Springer Series in Language and Communication – serie

This anthology was originally planned in connection with a symposium "Language in Primates: Implications for Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, and Philosophy," at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. Publication of the book would not have been possible without the support given to the Symposium by many individuals and groups. The Editors thank everyone involved for their kind and generous assistance. Specifi­ cally, we thank the invited speakers at the Symposium, Thomas A. Sebeok, H. Lyn Miles, Roger S. Fouts, and Thomas Simon. The chapters in this book by Miles, Fouts, and Simon are revised versions of their lectures at the Symposium. We thank Edward Simmel for his encouragement, his patience with our efforts, and his help in planning and directing the Symposium. For their financial assistance, we thank the co-sponsors of the Symposium: the Sigma Chi Foundation/William P. Huffman Scholar-in­ Residence Program at Miami University, as well as the Departments of Classics, Philosophy, Psychology, and Sociology and Anthropology at Miami. We thank Barbara Johnson, Polly J. Harris and Brenda Shaw for their secretarial and editorial help, and Shirley Gallimore for her patience, care, good humor, and hard work in typing the manuscript. Finally, we thank the contributors to this volume.

The developments in linguistic theory over the last three decades have given us a better understanding of the formal properties of language. However, as the truism goes, language does not exist in a vacuum. It in­ teracts with a cognitive system that involves much more than language and functions as the primary instrument of human communication. A theory of language must, therefore, be based on an integration of its for­ mal properties with its cognitive and communicative dimensions. The present work is offered as the modest contribution to this research paradigm. This book is a revised and slightly enlarged version of my doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In writing the original version, I had the privilege of working with Professor Charles E. Osgood, who is widely recognized as the founder and one of the leading figures of modern psycholinguistics. I have benefited from ex­ tensive and stimulating discussions with him, not only on this topic but in the development of his theory of language performance in general (see his Lectures on Language Performance, 1980, in this series). However, the re­ sponsibility for the particular formulations of the theory, hypotheses, in­ terpretations, and conclusions found in this work-which have been in­ fluenced, no doubt, by my training as a linguist, rather than as a psychologist-are my own.

The Many Faces of Imitation in Language Learning takes a fresh look at imitation in the wake of more than twenty years of highly productive research on child language acquisition. The book presents recent work in language acquisition by experts in first language acquistion, cognitive child development, and related fields. The chapters, many of which contain data not yet published, reflect diverse approaches to imitation and to the study of language learning. Imitation is examined from infancy through all stages of language development and many sides of imitation functions are discussed: cognitive, information processing, social, learning and biological. Individual differences among children in their use of imitation and the forms and functions of parent imitation are examined. Second language acquisition is studied alongside first language acquisition. These new approaches to imitation show how this concept can help us to further understand the social, information processing, learning, and biological processes in language acquisition, in language delay and in second language acquisition.This book is intended for researchers who are interested in the processes of language development.

In this book we take a fresh look at imitation. With the knowledge of some 20 years of research after Chomsky's initial critique of the behavioristic approach to language learning, it is time to explore imitation once again. How imitation is viewed in this book has changed greatly since the 1950s and can only be under­ stood by reading the various contributions. This reading reveals many faces, many forms, many causes, and many functions of imitation-cognitive, social, information processing, learning, and biological. Some views are far removed from the notion that an imitation must occur immediately or that it must be a per­ fect copy of an adult sentence. But the essence of the concept of imitation is retained: Some of the child's language behavior originates as an imitation of a prior model. The range of phenomena covered is broad and stimulating. Imitation's role is discussed from infancy on through all stages of language learning. Individual differences among children are examined in how much they use imitation, and in what forms and to what purposes they use it. The forms and functions of parent imitation of their child are considered. Second-language learning is studied alongside first-language learning. The juxtaposition of so many views and facets of imitation in this book will help us to study the commonalities as well as differences of various forms and functions of imitative language and will help us to discern the further dimensions along which we must begin to differentiate imitation.

In this volumume prominent scholars from different culturaland linguistic backgrounds are brought together to reviewthe empirical studies on the ability to reflect upon andmanipulate the phonemic segments of speech, and to presenttheir insights on the relationship of phonological aware-ness to the reading process.

The developments in linguistic theory over the last three decades have given us a better understanding of the formal properties of language. However, as the truism goes, language does not exist in a vacuum. It in­ teracts with a cognitive system that involves much more than language and functions as the primary instrument of human communication. A theory of language must, therefore, be based on an integration of its for­ mal properties with its cognitive and communicative dimensions. The present work is offered as the modest contribution to this research paradigm. This book is a revised and slightly enlarged version of my doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In writing the original version, I had the privilege of working with Professor Charles E. Osgood, who is widely recognized as the founder and one of the leading figures of modern psycholinguistics. I have benefited from ex­ tensive and stimulating discussions with him, not only on this topic but in the development of his theory of language performance in general (see his Lectures on Language Performance, 1980, in this series). However, the re­ sponsibility for the particular formulations of the theory, hypotheses, in­ terpretations, and conclusions found in this work-which have been in­ fluenced, no doubt, by my training as a linguist, rather than as a psychologist-are my own.

We had our first conversation about cognition, metacognition, and reading in September of 1976. Our particular concern was with reading and learning to read, and what, if anything, meta cognition might have to do with it all. We didn't really know much about metacognition then, of course, but then most other people were in the same predicament. Some people had been working with interesting approaches and results on metalanguage and reading, among them J. Downing, L. Ehri, L. Gleitman, 1. Mattingly, and E. Ryan, and it also was about that time that people were becoming aware of E. Markman's first studies of comprehension monitoring. Other than that perhaps the most influential item around was the perhaps already "classic" monograph by Kruetzer, Leonard, and Flavell on what children know about their own memory. Also in the air at that time were things like A. Brown's notions about "knowing, knowing about know­ ing, and knowing how to know," D. Meichenbaum's ideas about cognitive behavior modification, and the work by A. Brown and S. Smiley on the awareness of important units in text. Even though these developments were cited as new and innovative, it was not the case that psychologists had never before been of questions. They certainly interested in, or concerned with metacognitive sorts had, as clearly evidenced by the notion of "metaplans", in Miller, Galanter, and Pribram's Plans and the Structure of Behavior.

During the 1970s there was a rapid increase in interest in metacognition and metalinguistics. The impetus came from linguistics, psychology, and psycho­ linguistics. But with rather unusual rapidity the work from these scientific dis­ ciplines was taken over in education. This new direction in these various areas of academic study was taken simultaneously by several different investigators. Although they had varying emphases, their work sometimes appears to be over­ lapping; despite this, it has been rather difficult to find a consensus. This is reflected in the varying terminology used by these independent investigators­ "linguistic awareness," "metacognition," "metalinguistic ability," "task aware­ ness," "lexical awareness," and so on. For educators these developments presented a glittering array of new ideas that promised to throw light on children's thinking processes in learning how to read. Many reading researchers and graduate students have perceived this as a new frontier for the development of theory and research. However, the variety of independent theoretical approaches and their accompanying terminologies has been somewhat confusing.

An appreciation of temporal and logical relationships is one of the essential and defining features of human cognition. A central question in developmental psy­ chology, and in the philosophical speculations out of which psychology evolved, has been how children come to understand temporal and logical relationships. For many recent investigators, this question has been translated into empiri­ cal studies of children's acquisition of relational terms-words such as before, after, because, so, if, but, and or that permit the linguistic expression of logi­ cal relationships. In the mid 1970s, Katherine Nelson began to study young children's knowledge about routine activities in which they participated. The goal of this research was to understand how children represented their personal experiences and how these representations contributed to further cognitive development. A primary method used in the early phases of this research involved simply asking children to describe familiar events. They were asked, for example, "What happens when you have lunch at school?" or "What happens at a birthday party?" Hundreds of transcripts of children's responses to such questions were available when Lucia French became an NICHD Postdoctoral Fellow in Developmental Psychology at City University of New York in 1979.

Lisa is 4 years and 5 months old and Giulia 3 years and 4 months. One morning, the girls' father is taking them to nursery school. L: ... e bravissima, ha riscaldato l'auto. E' bravissima, vera? In praising the sun for having warmed up the car, Lisa has referred to it in the feminine gender, as in the German die Sonne. Her father corrects her by using the masculine gender. F: E' bravissimo. E' if sale. L: E' un maschietto, if sale? (Is the sun a little boy?) F: E'maschife. (It's masculine.) G [determined]: E' una femmina! (No, it's a girl!) F: Forse in tedesco. (Perhaps it is in German.) is left disoriented, speechless. Giulia This book is devoted to language acquisition in children who have been expos­ ed to two languages since birth. It has often been said that the study of simultaneous bilingualism is the "most fertile ground" for the formulation of general theories on language acquisition processes, and indeed, most of the studies on early bilingualism aim in this direction. But in a sense this book serves the reverse purpose. Using the results of psycholinguistic research as a basis, I have sought to understand the peculiarities of the process of language organization in the child who faces the problem of learning two languages when other children are learning only one. Thus, the recurring theme of my study is the diversity of bilingual as opposed to monolingual acquisition.

It is obvious that the growing child manifests an increasing understanding of his language and facility to use it. A major part of the child lan­ guage literature is concerned with the child's developing linguistic and communicative competence. Scattered evidence also shows, however, that children become progressively more aware of language as Zanguage. It is interesting to consider in what ways the internal structure and mechanisms of language become more accessible. Little is known about linguistic aware­ ness of this kind, the role it plays, or how it develops. When the new Projektgruppe fUr Psycholinguistik of the Max-Planck­ Gesellschaft was founded, "the child's conception .of language," in analogy to Piaget's "child's conception of the physical world," become one of the research unit's topics of study. As previous work on linguistic awareness was largely amorphous, we first organized a kind of conference workshop with some of those who had worked in the area. The aims of this meeting were to map out the field of study, detail the phenomena of interest, and define major theoretical issues. The meeting took place just after the creation of the project group, on May 3-7, 1977. The participants were psychologists and linguists who had either published work on metalinguistic issues in child language, or who could be expected to contribute substantially to the discussion. This book is a direct outcome of that conference, though it is not a complete reflection of the papers presented, or of the discussion that took place.

The area of concern to Dr. Wietske Noordman~Vonk has been variously seen as an aspect of long-term memory [F. I], secondary memory [F. 2], memory without record [F. 3], and semantic memory [F. 4J, the latter term being the one pre­ ferred by Dr. Noordman-Vonk herself. This proliferation of terminology is not an entirely trivial matter, for although the expressions clearly overlap in range, they do draw attention to different features of the phenomena under consideration. The work reported here is concerned with the form of representation and manipulation of our knowledge that, for example, a dog is an animal, or that mothers and daughters are parents and children. To put it more generally, the experiments attempt to elucidate the psychological processes involved in the~emantics of class-inclusion and, most importantly, to extend the explanatory principles there invoked to a new domain, that of kinship relations. Clearly, the connections between "ant" and "insect", or "flower" and "plant" have been known to us - as adults - for some considerable period of time; in the absence of brain injury or degeneration we are unlikely to "forget" that fathers and sons are kin of the same sex. We may therefor- pretheoretically - distinguish between retrieval of such knowledge and. re­ trieval of a rapidly fading sequence of random numbers that we are asked to recall after a single presentation. It is in this sense that the current work is concerned with long-term and not short-term memory.

In the study of human thought there could hardly be a more fundamental con­ cern than language and reasoning. In the tradition of Western philosophy, humans are distinguished by their ability to speak and to think rationally. And language is often considered a prerequisite for rational thought. If psycholoQists, then, are ever to discover what is truly human about their species, they will have to discover how language is produced and understood, and how it plays a role in reasoning and other forms of rational thought. Within psychology there has been an imperative to study language and rea­ soning together. Since Wundt, psychologists have succeeded in building a the­ oretical foundation for both language and reasoning. What has become clear from these beginnings is that the two are inextricably bound to each other. Like the two players ina chess game, take away one of them and the game no longer exists. On the one hand, producing and understanding speech re­ quires an intricate process of reasoning. Speakers must rationally choose sentences that will affect their listeners in ways they intend, and listen­ ers must infer what speakers could conceivably have meant in selecting the sentences they did. Reasoning, inference, and rational thought lie at the very center of speaking and listening. On the other hand, logical reasoning begins with, and is influenced by, the language in which a problem is stated.

This study deals with variation in grammar both from a theoretical and an empirical point of view. In Part I (Chaps. 1-4), an attempt is made to char­ acterize this phenomenon within the broader context of what might be called the "fluctuating character of natu'ral language", and to develop suitable and precise descriptive techniques that account for it. The method which is pro­ posed here is called "variety grammar" - roughly speaking, this is a formal grammar with probabilistic weighting for an ordered set of varieties, such as dialects, sociolects, registers, or developmental stages. In Part II (Chaps. 5-8), this technique is applied to an important area of grammatical variation - to the process of second language acquisition in social context, based on a large investigation of the language behavior of foreign migrant workers acquiring German through everyday contacts. We have tried to characterize their "developing grammars" and to relate this complex developmental process to social and individual factors that determine it.

This monograph originated as an interim report on the research project Cog- nitive and Social Determinants on Language Acquisition which I conducted under the auspices of the German Department of the University of Frankfurt from September 1971 until the end of 1976. Since November 1972 this project was financed by the Max-Planck-Institut fur Bildungsforschung in Berlin as part of the research project Elternhaus und Schule conducted by Oevermann, Krappmann, and Kreppner. While the goal of this project on language acquisition is the reconstruc- tion of the language development of three German children: two middle-class children and one lower-class child from the time of the first linguistic utterances up to the fourth birthday, this interim report deals only with early language development, and it is essentially based on a large body of observational data on the language development of the two middle-class chil- dren from their 16th up to their 23rd months of life. In its German version this monograph was completed in March 1975 and pub- lished by Klett Verlag in the series "Konzepte der Humanwissenschaften".

This volume contains the papers read at the conference on 'Semantics from different points of view' that took place at Konstanz University in Septem- ber 1978. This interdisciplinary conference Vias organized by the':Sonderfor- schungsbereich 99 - Linguistik' and sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsge- meinschaft. Li~guists, philosophers, logicians, and psychologists met to dis- cuss recent developments in the study of the semantics of natural language from the point of view of their disciplines. But this is not to say that there was one particular topic shared by all the participants. The conference was organized because the seven research groups that constitute the Sonderforschungsbereich wanted to discuss their results in an international context and to get advice and guidance for the work still to be done. Therefore, quite a number of topics were covered, though at different levels of precision, under the general label 'semantics'. And the selection of topics, as well as the relative importance given to them, is due to the research interests currently represented in the Sonderforschungs- bereich.

This book presents a new classification of speech acts. It is an alter­ native to all previously published classifications of speech acts. The classification proposed here is based on an extensive set of data, name­ lyon all the verbs designating linguistic activities and aspects thereof. A theoretically and methodologically justifiable method is used to proceed in a number of steps from these data to the classification. The classification is documented in a lexicon with two sections. The first section exhibits the classification in all its details. Each verb is listed to its meaning at the appropriate place in the classification. according The second, alphabetically ordered section enables one to locate the verbs classified in the first part. The speech act classification as presented in this book has a number of consequences for linguistic theorizing: the book makes advances in three linguistically relevant fields - speech act theory, lexicology, and theory of meaning. In speech act theory firstly of course a classifica­ tion is proposed which is theoretically justified and which is simul­ taneously based explicitly and systematically on linguistic data. Second­ ly, a wider concept of speech acts is introduced which proves its value by making possible a linguistically justified classification. Thirdly, the concept of speech act sequence (or more generally partial order) is brought into focus as a major organizational principle of the semantic relation between speech acts.

Not very many years ago, it was common for language researchers and theorists to argue that language development was somehow special and separate from other aspects of development. It was a period when the "1 ittle 1 inguist" view of language development was common, and much discussion was devoted to develop­ mental "linguistic universals," in contrast to more broadly defined cognitive universals. It seemed to me at the time (and still does) that such views reflected more their promulgators' ignorance of those aspects of cognitive development most likely to provide illuminating parallels with language development than they did the true developmental state of affairs. Coming from a neo-Piagetian frame of reference, it seemed to me that there were striking parallels be­ tween the development of children's language comprehension abilities and the cognitive developmental changes occurring contemporaneously, largely during the period Piaget characterized as the preoperational stage. And, though more difficult to see even now, there appeared also to be developmentally earlier parallels during the sensory-motor stage.

This book studies language behaviour in the larger context of modelling or­ ganismic behaviour more generally. It starts out from the basic premise that what is characteristic of organismic behaviour is that an organism uses its behavioural acts to accomplish something in its interactions with the world in which it finds itself. These two features, that an organism has a behav­ ioural repertoire and that it deploys specific behavioural acts from its repertoire in an intentional way, define the agentive nature of an organism. The study of organismic behaviour, then, must primarily concern itself with this agentive aspect of an organism and determine what structures and proces­ ses underlie these intentional organismic acts. We should be able to say what primitive structures and what primitive processes put together in what ways can give rise to the kinds of behavioural acts an organism engages in. Any explanation of behaviour that we formulate in terms of underlying structures and processes must be testable and must be consonant with the observed pheno­ menological aspects of such behaviour.

This volume owes its existance to many different sources and influ­ ences. It is based on a meeting that took place from April 30 to May 2, 1982 at the University of Technology in Darmstadt. The idea for that meeting came while we were elaborating a research program on concept development and the development of word meaning; we were inspired by Werner Deutsch of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (The Netherlands) and by the Volkswagen Foundation in Hannover (Federal Republic of Germany) to organize an international conference on the same topic. We set out to invite a long list of colleagues, and we only regret that not all of them were able to attend. This volume should not be viewed as the proceedings of that conference. On the one hand, it does not include all of the papers presented there, and on the other hand, some of our colleagues who were unable to attend were nevertheless willing to write contributions. Furthermore, some who did pre­ sent papers at the conference revised and reformulated them or even submitted completely new ones for this book. We feel, however, that in the end we have arranged a valuable collection of work in the theory and research of a field that has occupied not only psychologists and linguists, but also philosophers, anthropologists, and many others for a long time.

Prosody: Models and Measurements is the fruit of a three-day workshop held in Paris in April, 1982. The workshop was one of a series which is sponsored by the Maison des Sciences de I'Homme under the auspices of the European Psycho linguistics Association, and which aims to bring together workers in a particular field from different European laboratories and to encourage future collaboration across regional, national and disciplinary boundaries. Thus the topic of the workshop - "Prosody" - was fairly liberally interpreted in the invitations, and the participants were drawn from a variety of background- linguistics, phonetics, psychology. Despite this diversity, however, there was a surprising degree of congruence in the topics discussed and points of view adopted. We have attempted in the introduction to the present volume to as well as to account for the draw out the similarities between approaches, differences and to set the individual contributions against the background of current research in the field. The book is not merely a transcript of what was said during the sessions. All of the papers have been rewritten by the participants - in some cases extensively - to reflect the comments that were made in discussion and the points of contact and disagreement that became evident during the three days.

In the past fi fteen years there has been a growi ng interest in the development of children's awareness of language as an object in itself -- a phenomenon now generally referred to as metal inguistic awareness. Until the publication of an earlier volume in the Springer Series in Language and Communication, The Chitd's Conoeption oi Language, edited by A. Sinclair, R. J. Jarvella, and W. J. M. Levelt, there had been no systematic treatment of metalinguistic awareness. The major goal of that volume was to map out the field of study by describing the phenomenon of interest and defining major theoretical issues. The aim of the present volume is to present an overview of metalinguistic awareness in children which reflects the current state of research and theory. The volume is divided into three major sections. The first considers various conceptual and methodological issues that have arisen from efforts to study metalinguistic awareness. It addresses such questions as what is metalinguistic awareness, when does it begin to emerge, and what tasks and procedures can be employed to assess its development in young children. The second sect ion cri ti ca 11y revi ews the research that has been conducted i nto the four general types of metalinguistic awareness -- phonologieal, word, syntactic, and pragmatic awareness. In the final section the development of metalinguistic awareness is examined in relation to general cognitive development, reading acquisition, bilingualism, and early childhood education.

This book deals with the conditions and the consequences of the production of different syntactic sentence structures. During the sixties the syntactic structure of sentences was one of the most intensively studied topics in psycholinguistic research. The dominant interest did not, however, lie in the function of syntactic structures but in the ability to understand and to utter them. Later, in the seventies the interest shifted to the semantic structure of sentences. Many studies centred around the structural aspects of the repre­ sentation of knowledge. The leading question was: how can the meaning of an utterance be described? The widely accepted answer was: the central unit of meaning is the proposition. From this point of view, the aim of an utter­ ance is to transmit propositional meaning, and syntactic structure is of inter­ est only insofar as it influences the comprehension of propositional meaning. In this book both aspects, i. e. the syntactic and the semantic structure of sentences have been considered. The dynamic aspects of knowledge use and its relationship to the syntactic structure of sentences are thoroughly analysed and studied empirically. The main question is how semantic knowledge is communicated through syntactic structure. Syntactic structure has causes and consequences. In general we assume that the syntactic structure reflects dynamic aspects of the knowledge base of the speaker and determines dynamic states in the listener.

This study of gender was conceived when I first took up the position of lecturer in linguistics at the University of Tiibingen in 1975. My particular in­ terest in gender arose out of the work with German children and adults con­ ducted in the context of preparing my doctoral dissertation for the University of York; my position at the University of Tiibingen has given me the opportunity to carry out the necessary research in both Germany and Britain. The empirical investigations reported in this study were begun in my first year in Tiibingen and continued over a period of 7 years. In this connection, I would like to express my thanks to the staff and pupils of all the schools who participated in the testing: Kindergarten Waldhauser-Ost, Kindergarten Winkelwiese, Grundschule Wanne, Grundschule Waldhauser-Ost, and Albert Schweitzer Schule (Tiibingen); Somerford Junior and Infants School and Twynham Junior and Infants School (Christchurch, GB); Burdyke Infants, Badger Hill Junior and Infants School and Joseph Rowntree Junior School (York, GB). Thanks must also go to the families of Georg, Hanna and Gisela and of course to the children themselves, who allowed the intrusion of recording equipment so regularly into their homes. I am also grateful to the staff and students of the Universities of Tfibingen, York and Manchester who cooperated in several of the investigations.

This volume is a revised and extended edition of Epistemische Bedeutung (Doherty 1985). The German and the English versions dif­ fer in a number of aspects, only two of which can be attributed to the difference between German and English: A number of com­ binatorial options of epistemic particles discussed in Epistemische Bedeutung have not been included in the English version, as the English-speaking reader may be expected to be more interested in the general aspects of the topic than in the specific properties of a class of linguistic entities which does not exist in English at all. The second difference between the German and English editions concerns a ter­ minological change: "Evaluative Einstellungen" has been translated not as "evaluative;' but as "emotional attitudes;' This has become necessary, as "Bewertung" ("evaluation") has been introduced to replace "Urtei/" ("judgement;' "assessment"), which was a mor­ phologically less transparent term, lacking a full-fledged paradigm of derivations to cope with the various applications of this central no­ tion. The terminological change yielded labels for the complex com­ ponents of epistemic meaning (namely "evaluated" and "semi­ evaluated propositional meaning") which had remained without names in the German edition. Though the change from "judgement" to "evaluation" is mainly one of terminology and has not introduced any new content, it was connected with a revision in the way the logical nature of the basic epistemic elements is represented.

The chapters of this volume were originally contributions pre- sented at a seminar entitled "The Written Code and Conceptions of Reality" held on the island of Sydkoster in August, 1985. The seminar was financed by a grant to the editor from The Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The word-processing of manuscripts was carried out by Chri- stine Aranda, Maria Axelson, Marianne Axelson and Lotta Strand, who carried the major burden. Their help in this project, as well as in many other common concerns, is deeply appreciated. The preparation of a book that is a collective enterprise is, in some respects, greatly facilitated by modern word-processing. When it comes to putting together the final product, however, the limita- tions of technologies are easily recognized as a result of the compli- cations that arise from the variation in systems used by con- tributors. Lotta Strand was responsible for the coordination neces- sary for completing the final version of the manuscript. Without her patient efforts and skills in this new type of literacy, word- processing technology would have been an obstacle rather than an asset.Excellent bibliographic assistance was provided by Christina Brage, Lennart Eriksson and Inger Karlsson of the library at the Departments of Theme Studies of the University Library of Lin- koping. Linguistic advice on the chapters written by contributors who were not wise enough to be born with English as their mother tongue was given by Alex de Courcy.

It is often assumed that metalinguistic performance (e.g., detection of ambiguity, judgments of grammaticality) straightforwardly reflects linguistic knowledge. The inadequacies of such an assumption are explored in this volume, which documents the subtleties of the relationship between metalinguistic performance and knowledge of a second language (interlinguistic competence) from the perspectives of language acquisition theory and cognitive and developmental psychology. This thorough and up-to-date examination of metalinguistic phenomena offers insight to those involved in designing elicitation materials, analyzing and interpreting metalinguistic performance data, and applying such evidence to descriptions of interlanguage grammars and to second-language acquisition theory. The book also contributes constructively to the current debate concerning the role of metalinguistic variables in second-language acquisition, that is, how they ultimately affect success or failure in learning a second language.

The present volume is the result of a project which concentrated on a selected subset of linguistic knowledge with the aim of giving a systematic account of the various aspects of structure and process in this subset and the interpretation of these. The subset that for a number of reasons appeared appropriate to this undertaking centres around the dimensional adjectives of German. That the en­ terprise ultimately produced a less integrated and complete result than expected is due to several reasons. Some of these are of an intrinsic nature, ever present, and not particularly surprising. Some, however, are related to the character of the project itself and are worth commenting upon, as they reflect specific expe­ riences and difficulties which we encountered during several years of working on the project. We started from the assumption that the dimensional adjectives constitute a sufficiently rich, but nevertheless limited domain of grammatical and concep­ tual structure which is fairly well understood and explored in relevant aspects. Consequently we expected that summarizing, integrating, and extending the nu­ merous results that were available should quickly lead to a more complete picture of the interaction of the components involved. However, even had the premise of this assumption been correct, the conclusion turned out to be wrong fairly early in the project. On closer inspection, the investigations of the phenomena were much less complete, the facts agreed upon less systematic, and the proposed anal­ yses far less convincing than supposed initially.

Virginia Volterra and Carol Erting have made an important contribu­ tion to knowledge with this selection of studies on language acquisi­ tion. Collections of studies clustered more or less closely around a topic are plentiful, but this one is 1 nique. Volterra and Erting had a clear plan in mind when making their selection. Taken together, the studies make the case that language is inseparable from human inter­ action and communication and, especially in infancy, as much a matter of gestural as of vocal behavior. The editors have arranged the papers in five coherent sections and written an introduction to each section in addition to the expected general introduction and conclu­ sion. No introductory course in child and language development will be complete without this book. Presenting successively studies of hearing children acquiring speech languages, of deaf children acquiring sign languages, of hear­ ing children of deaf parents, of deaf children of hearing parents, and of hearing children compared with deaf children, Volterra and Erting give one a wider than usual view oflanguage acquisition. It is a view that would have been impossible not many years ago - when the primary languages of deaf adults had received neither recognition nor respect.