This book is a timely and important contribution to the study of language acquisition. Itshould be of value to those engaged in active research in this field, as well as to the generalreader with an interest in language acquisition and linguistics. The papers are rather technical andmay be difficult for the general reader, but the introductory essay by the editor, Brent, goes a longway to provide the background and describe the contents of the other essays in a morecomprehensible language for the nontechnical reader. It should be pointed out, however, that thisbook is about language acquisition in general (including the theory of learning), particularly thecomputational approach in the research. It is not specifically concerned with second languageacquisition.