Phonemic awareness and phonetic skill are the backbones of phonological theory. In phonological acquisition, the presence or lack of the former crucially determines the outcome of the latter. This inescapably becomes a common thread that interweaves developmental phonology in both childhood and adulthood. Child and adult-learner speech in the course of development constitute separate linguistic systems in their own right: they are intermediate states whose endpoint is, or ought to be, mastery of targeted speech either in a first or a second language. These intermediate states form the theme of the proposed book that introduces the term protolanguage (to refer to child language in development) and juxtaposes it with interlanguage (to refer to language development in adulthood). Though major languages like English and Spanish are not excluded, there is an emphasis in the book on under-reported languages: monolingual Hungarian and Swedish and bilingual combinations, like Greek-English and German-English. There is also an emphasis on under-represented studies in IL: L2 German from L1 French ; L2 English from Catalan and Portuguese ; and in dialectal acquisition of Ecuadorian Spanish from Andalusian speakers. This volume brings together different methodological approaches with a stress on both phonetic and phonological analysis. The volume has a focus on links between developmental perspectives in protolanguage (introduced in a specific way here) and interlanguage (typically associated with second language development in the post-critical-period). Its strengths are that it includes: both child and adult developmental perspectives; studies on less-researched languages and combinations of languages; descriptive and/or theoretical results from a combination of methodological approaches (e.g. single-case, cross-sectional; spontaneous speech samples, narrative retells); a consideration of speech acquisition in the general context of language. The central theme underpinning the volume is hoped to motivate a shift in the general tendency among researchers to specialize in language subfields (L1 acquisition; L2 acquisition, bilingualism; typical/atypical language) of what is actually one common linguistic domain, i.e. the study of speech sounds (phonology/phonetics).
Elena Babatsouli is the Director of the Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech in Chania, Greece, whose purpose is the advancement and dissemination of scientific knowledge in various aspects of language acquisition, typical and atypical. She received a BA in English from Royal Holloway, University of London, a MA in Languages and Business from London South Bank University and her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Crete. Her research interests are in the acquisition, use and loss of language in all its forms (first, second, bilingual, dialectal), and in clinical implications. She was co-chair of the inaugural International Symposium of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech 2015 and co-editor of its Proceedings. David Ingram is Professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at Arizona State University. He received his BS from Georgetown University and his PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University. His research interests are in language acquisition in typically developing children and children with language disorders, with a cross-linguistic focus. The language areas of interest are phonological, morphological, and syntactic acquisition. He is the author of Phonological disability in children (1976), Procedures for the phonological analysis of children's language (1981), and First language acquisition (1989). His most recent work has focused on whole word measures of phonological acquisition.

Elena Babatsouli

David Ingram