Interest in neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to the study of SLA has continued to increase over the last several years. In response to this trend, this volume offers a variety of chapters stemming from both neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic points of view, broadly defined. The book is split into two sections. The first section contains five chapters written from a neurolinguistic perspective. The first chapter in this section is a contribution by van den Noort, Bosch, Hadzibeganovic, Mondt, Haverkort, and Hugdahl that reviews findings from neuroimaging studies and relates them to the debate about the nature of a critical period for language acquisition. Reichle’s chapter 2 presents an empirical study that compares information structure processing in native and nonnative French speakers; based on the results, the author argues against a strong version of the critical period hypothesis. In chapter 3, Nijakowska provides a review of findings related to the neuroanatomical substrates of dyslexia and briefly discusses implications for SLA, whereas in chapter 4, Gabryś-Barker proposes a study to investigate second-language (L2) learners’ appraisals of a translation task and how these appraisals affect task performance. The neurolinguistic section of the book closes with an empirical study by Ślȩzak-Świat that attempts to relate specific gestures and facial expressions to success in an oral task in advanced L2 English.

The second section of the book, which includes seven chapters written from a psycholinguistic perspective, opens with a think-aloud study on bilingual language control in translation by Whyatt and continues with a chapter by Zalewski on how connectionist-enactivist models can provide insight on the nature of the writing process. In chapter 8, Latkowska discusses conceptual transfer between a bilingual’s languages and makes methodological recommendations for research in this area. Malec’s chapter 9 describes a study on the relative difficulty of test items that target asymmetrical verb-noun collocations in L2 English; in the following chapter, Piasecka examines gender differences in first-language (L1) and L2 reading skills. In chapter 11, Ewert reports the results of a qualitative study on L1 Polish students in a Russian and English university program and, based on her findings, asserts that these multilingual language users form a unique speech community due to their shared language experiences. In the final chapter of the volume, Otwinowska-Kasztelanic writes about the connection between awareness and cognate vocabulary use, describing the results of an experiment that suggest that if students are made aware of similarities between their L1 and L2, they can take advantage of this knowledge in order to improve L2 fluency.

This volume may be of interest to SLA researchers looking for a broad range of chapters from psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic perspectives as well as to graduate students in SLA courses—although a few chapters require some knowledge of neurolinguistics to be fully understood. A positive aspect of this book is that it includes a variety of topics that are relatively less frequently investigated in the SLA literature, such as L2 information structure processing, dyslexia, and gesture. This volume thus has the potential to spark interest in some of these less developed areas of research. However, the volume also has some negative aspects. For example, a couple of the chapters are only minimally tied to SLA, with one chapter never mentioning anything explicitly L2 related. Additionally, a few contributions are poorly written, with grammatical and wording choice errors that make it somewhat difficult to get through them. Also problematic is the fact that some of the empirical studies reported are either not well designed or do not include enough information about their design to be able to draw clear conclusions from the results. For example, in the chapter on bilingual language control and translation, the think-aloud data are given only in Polish, with no English translations. In the chapter on L2 gesture, it is unclear how success in the oral task was operationalized, or how different types of gestures were defined, quantified, and coded. In general, some of the studies do not include enough information about their participants (e.g., L1, proficiency level, type of experience with the L2). In sum, this volume is worth taking a look at due to the variety of topics covered; however, the quality of its contributions is inconsistent.