First published in 1986. By the late seventies, linguists and psycholinguists in many countries were convinced of the need for gathering data on the acquisition of different types of languages and using the crosslinguistic method. In November 1979 the authors of this volume were invited to prepare interpretive summaries of the course of acquisition of various languages. Preliminary versions of chapters on individual languages were studied in a seminar on crosslinguistic approaches to language acquisition at the 1980 Summer Linguistic Institute at the University of New Mexico, followed by a conference at Berkeley in November 1980.