This volume, which consists of five thematic parts, brings together a collection of recent studies on child SLA from the perspective of generative grammar. The first chapter of Part 1, entitled “Recent Perspectives in Child Second Language Acquisition” (Haznedar & Gavruseva), serves as an introduction to the book. The editors define child second language (L2) learners as successive bilinguals whose onset of exposure to the target L2 is after age 4 but before age 8. The main goal of this volume is to explore the nature of L2 grammars in order to define child SLA in relation to other types of acquisition, such as child monolingual and bilingual first language (L1) acquisition, adult SLA, and atypical SLA by children with specific language impairment. A comparative perspective is adopted that sheds light on a number of controversial issues, such as the role of Universal Grammar in constraining L2 development, L2 developmental sequences, maturational factors that impinge on the growth of grammar, critical period effects for different linguistic domains (e.g., morphology and syntax), and the role of L1 transfer in relation to age of onset of exposure to the L2. Part 1 also includes the chapters “Progressive Aspect in Child L2 English” (Ionin) and “Child Second Language Acquisition or Successive First Language Acquisition?” (Meisel), which address age effects and differences between child and adult learners. Part 2 focuses on the acquisition of determiner elements and includes two chapters: “Misrepresentation of Dutch Neuter Gender in Older Bilingual Children?” (Brower, Cornips, & Hulk) and “Comparing Child and Adult L2 Acquisition of the Greek DP” (Chondrogianni). Part 3 contains four chapters that address the issue of morphological variability: “The Development of Copula and Auxiliary be and Overgeneration of be in Child L2 English” (Gavruseva), “Truncation in Child L2 Acquisition: Evidence from Verbless Utterances” (Prévost), “The Status of Subjects in Early Child L2 English” (Mobaraki, Vainikka, & Young-Scholten), and “The Morphology/Syntax Interface in Child L2 Acquisition” (Geçkin & Haznedar). Part 4 focuses on comparisons of child L1, child L2, and adult L2 development and includes contributions by Blom (“Testing the Domain-by-Age Model: Inflection and Placement of Dutch Verbs”) and Unsworth (“Comparing Child L2 Development with Adult L2 Development: How to Measure L2 Proficiency”). Part 5, which focuses on a comparison between typical versus atypical child SLA, consists of a contribution by Paradis, entitled “Tense as a Clinical Marker in English L2 Acquisition with Language Delay/Impairment.”

Overall, this volume is an important contribution to the field of SLA and would be ideal for use as a text in a graduate seminar course. A key strength is the comparative approach adopted, which renders this book of potential interest to researchers in the field of child SLA as well as to researchers in the related areas of adult SLA and also monolingual and bilingual child L1 acquisition. Other positive aspects include the range of different methods (including innovative experimental designs) adopted to investigate the various acquisition issues and the presentation of evidence from new (naturalistic as well as experimentally elicited) data, gathered from English L2 contexts as well as from non-English L2 contexts (e.g., French, Dutch, German, and Greek).

This book is lacking in a few areas. Readers would expect to find the reasoning behind the adoption of 4–8 years old as the age of onset (as opposed to alternative cutoff points) to define child L2 in the introduction to the work; instead, one has to wait until chapter 3 (Meisel) for an in-depth discussion of this issue. Additionally, other important variables—aside from age of onset—such as extent of L1 and L2 use are given short shrift. The chapters by Ionin and Meisel, which are included in Part 1, would have been more appropriately placed in Part 2 (i.e., morphological variability) and Part 5 (i.e., comparisons of child L1, child L2, and adult L2), respectively. Most of the chapters are excellent from a theoretical and methodological perspective; there are, however, some errors that have gone unnoticed. The results of statistical analyses are missing in chapter 4 (Brower, Cornips, & Hulk). Chapter 7 (Prévost) misrepresents the verbless utterances reported in Lakshmanan’s (1993/Reference Lakshmanan1994) study as being restricted to omissions of the copula, when in fact they mainly involved omission of lexical verbs. Additionally, Spanish L2 is missing from the non-English L2 contexts covered, which is unexpected, given recent generative research in this L2 context.