The interrelation between language acquisition and linguistic theory has long been recognized as a fruitful area of research. Guasti provides a detailed and comprehensive review of the major areas of the development of a first language and its relation to linguistic theory. The book consists of 11 chapters on the development of all areas of grammar, with an obvious emphasis on syntax. Each chapter begins with an overview of the theoretical tools necessary to understand the topic of the chapter, followed by the empirical phenomena, and a discussion that integrates the theory and the data.

Chapter 1, “Basic Concepts,” introduces the major concepts and questions that are central to language acquisition and linguistic theory: crosslinguistic similarity in the process of acquisition, negative evidence, the minimal effects of cultural differences on the course of grammatical development, and so forth. These and other poverty of stimulus arguments are used to motivate the logical problem of language acquisition. Chapter 2, “First Steps into Language,” discusses the development of infants' language-related skills (e.g., phonotactic discrimination at birth; Mehler et al. 1988), followed by the onset of speech production skills (e.g., vegetative sounds, cooing, and babbling). In chapter 3, “Acquisition of the Lexicon,” Guasti begins by presenting the reasons why isolating words in the speech stream as well as building word meaning could be problematic for children. She then considers the acquisition of verbs and the difficulties involved, followed by extensive discussion of various bootstrapping approaches to the acquisition of the lexicon.

Chapter 4, “The Emergence of Syntax,” is somewhat global in nature, serving as a good transition into the subsequent more focused chapters. Guasti discusses the acquisition of word order, clausal structure, subject agreement relations, and the well-known root infinitive phenomenon. She introduces pivotal notions such as the Full Competence Hypothesis, the Small Clause Hypothesis, and several theories on root infinitives (e.g., Schütze & Wexler, 1996; Rizzi, 1993/1994) as well as child language phenomena that are the basis of much discussion in the literature—for example, the position of verbs in V2 languages or the position of verbs with respect to negation.

The remaining seven chapters are considerably more focused, each dealing with a specific topic in depth. Chapter 5, “Null Subjects in Early Language,” discusses the various accounts of null subjects in child language: parametric accounts, the truncation account, and processing accounts. Chapter 6, “The Acquisition of Wh-Questions,” addresses the acquisition of wh-questions (including subject-auxiliary inversion and short- and long-distance movement) as well as relative clauses. Chapter 7, “The Acquisition of NP-Movement,” discusses the acquisition of the passive and various accounts for problems that English children have with the passive. Chapter 8, “The Acquisition of the Binding Principles,” is organized very neatly into three core subsections—one on each principle of the Binding Theory. Chapter 9, “The Acquisition of Quantification,” introduces what is arguably the newest area of the study of child language. Guasti spends considerable space discussing the theoretical aspects of adult quantification and then shows the sorts of errors children make with respect to quantification. She tackles the acquisition of control structures in chapter 10. Finally, chapter 11, “Dissociation between Language and Other Cognitive Abilities,” deals with the various symptoms of Specific Language Impairment (SLI), as well as theories on SLI. Arguing for a modular view of the mind, Guasti shows that children with SLI are delayed only in their linguistic abilities and not in any other domain, whereas contrastively, children with William's Syndrome have relatively unaffected linguistic abilities but are delayed in other domains.

This book is almost exclusively focused on first language acquisition. However, because a solid understanding of the empirical phenomena and theoretical issues in first language acquisition has a direct bearing on the study of SLA, this book should be of great interest to those researching and teaching SLA. Although Guasti clearly approaches the topic from a generative perspective, the treatment of the empirical phenomena is so well presented that it could be of use to researchers working within any paradigm. Because of the pedagogically sound organization of each chapter, the explicit and detailed presentation of each topic, and the overall thoroughness of the book, I highly recommend this as a textbook or background reading. It is perhaps too advanced for the typical undergraduate class and is most appropriate for an introductory graduate-level class in first or second language acquisition.