Dan Isaac Slobin (Ed). Hiilsdale, NJ: ... ed in these two bulky volumes. .... ing for cognitive principles in the acquisition of Kaluli, Bambi Schieffelin blazes a new.
SSLA, 12,233-241. Printed in the United States of America.
THE SEARCH FOR UNIVERSAL OPERATING PRINCIPLES IN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
THE CROSSLINGUISTIC STUDY OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, VOL. 1, THE DATA. VOL. 2, THEORETICAL ISSUES. Dan Isaac Slobin (Ed). Hiilsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1985. Pp. xx + 1333. During the 1970s, in connection with rivaling approaches to the development of language in the child, several ambitious and rather important edited books were published on developmental psycholinguistics. Many of them were theoretically or descriptively interesting conference proceedings (e.g., Lock, 1978; Slobin, 1971); some were collections based on invited contributions (e.g., Huxley & Ingram, 1971; Moore, 1973); and still another type was the one best represented by the volume edited by C. A. Ferguson and D. Slobin, Studies of Child Language Development (1973). Here, the emphasis was comparative. Many classical and not so classical papers were collected and made available for the English-speaking world on children acquiring languages of different types. At the same time, Slobin's much-quoted contribution to this collection, "Cognitive Prerequisites for the Acquisition of Language" (1973) outlined a new research strategy for child language studies. Rather than looking for innate structures on the basis of studies on the acquisition of one single language, he proposed that researchers, through the study of many languages, should try to identify universal operating principles that the child uses in approaching any language. Many of these principles have become commonplace in child language research (Pay attention to the order of elements! Pay attention to the end of words!). Slobin also initiated an ambitious empirical project in which data from many unrelated languages were to be described with basically the same metatheoretical approach, comparable data sources, and an analytic methodology. The summation of this enterprise, which lasted for more than a decade, is represented in these two bulky volumes. The books promise to become one of the most quoted descriptive sources of the field during the coming decade. From a strictly informational point of view, they represent the best one can obtain from diary-like and more sophisticated observational studies in several languages. At the same time, most of the papers present an intellectually stimulating middle-of-the-road approach to the mechanisms of acquisition, an approach that tries to overcome both the one-sidedness of the strictly language
