646

Book Reviews

doi:10.1017/S0272263109990088

INCOMPLETE ACQUISITION IN BILINGUALISM: RE-EXAMINING

THE AGE FACTOR. Silvina Montrul. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2008.
Pp. x + 312.
As one of the rst generative acquisition researchers who looked into the competence of heritage speaker bilingual individuals, Montruls body of work is
rightfully the standard for formal linguistic studies on Hispanic heritage speaker
bilingualism. This book is the capstone to a pioneering and novel research program, initiated close to a decade ago and continuing to the present and beyond.
Called by different labels across the world (e.g., background language, home
language speakers), heritage language bilinguals are child naturalistic acquirers
of a minority language spoken at home along with a majority language acquired
either simultaneously or subsequently at a very early age. Crucially, however, a
heritage language is not the language of the general society in which the child
grows up and in which the child is formally educated. Spanish in the context of
North America, the language most directly examined in this book, is a clear case
of a heritage language; however, any minority language acquired at home that
comes in contact with a majority language in any location qualies as a heritage
language.
This volume is innovative in its completeness and the breadth of issues
addressed. It successfully demonstrates how and why the investigation of child
heritage language bilingual competence outcomes in adulthood adds to many
key epistemological discussions pertinent to adult SLA theory, linguistic theory
in general, and rst language (L1) attrition studies. Furthermore, this work
provides a thorough review of an impressive amount of available literature on
nonnative ultimate attainment. Montrul shows that age of acquisition is deterministic not only for adult SLA but also for what properties are vulnerable to
incomplete acquisition in childhood bilingualism and L1 attrition.
Since the dawn of SLA theories, there has been an active debate as to what
outcomes can be reasonably expected in second language (L2) ultimate attainment. Although conceived of differentially by individual researchers and various cognitive-SLA paradigms, implicit to any strong application of the critical
period hypothesis to adult language acquisition is the assumption that age of
exposure is an inevitably deterministic variable to ultimate native success. Details aside, many proponents of critical or sensitive period explanations of adult
L2 and native control competence differences maintain that increasing age of
exposure delimits the mere possibility of nativeness. Although not always explicitly stated, it is fair to claim that many of these researchers take the position
that language acquired before the onset of a critical or sensitive period should
have no other recourse than to be acquired completely. Although Montrul
shows that age of acquisition is related to nonnative outcomes, she demonstrates
how nonnative outcomes are not limited to adult language acquisition but also
obtain even when the language was natively acquired in childhood. She postulates that nonnative outcomes in heritage language bilingualism occur on a continuum of various degrees of incomplete acquisition (i.e., arrested development
of the native grammar due to the influence of the majority language, the L2),

Book Reviews

647

L1 attrition, or a combination of both. It is signicant that Montrul demonstrates

that heritage speaker bilinguals of Spanish differ from native controls in many
domains of grammar (e.g., use of subject pronouns, differential object marking,
aspect, and mood) despite the fact that they have acquired Spanish as a L1 in
childhood. This effectively deconstructs the notion that prepubescent language
acquisition inevitably results in nativelike convergence, which, in turn, questions the position that child and adult acquisition must be fundamentally different. After all, if child naturalistic acquisition can result in comparative differences
from the established monolingual norms without raising questions about the
extent to which these learners had accessibility to inborn linguistic mechanisms, then why should the presence of L1-adult L2 differences necessarily
mean a fundamental difference? Assuming that quality and quantity of input,
language contact, or language transfer as well as (some) affective factors come
together to explain heritage speaker outcome differences, it is reasonable to
argue that these factors also pertain to the outcome differences noted in adult
SLA without the processes and available mechanisms that constrain language
learning as being inevitably unique. That heritage speakers empirically test
similarly to adult L2 learners for some properties, are outperformed by advanced L2 learners, and are more comparable to native-speaker controls than
L2 learners in yet other domains (or subproperties of specic domains) suggest
that heritage speakers are differentunderstanding these differences more
completely is the object of this book and much future research. Montrul highlights many issues that must be taken into account when assessing the competence of bilinguals, child and adult alike, and that so-called incompleteness
is both relative and dynamic. As such, this book is compulsory reading for
all students and researchers who are interested in SLA, bilingualism, and L1
attrition.
(Received 8 January 2009)

Jason Rothman
The University of Iowa

doi:10.1017/S027226310999009X

FORMULAIC LANGUAGE: PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES. Alison Wray.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xv + 305.
Formulaic language is a term used by many researchers to refer to lexical units
more than one word long. This fast-growing area of applied linguistics has seen
a considerable number of publications in the past decade. A search in the Cambridge scientic linguistics and language behavior abstracts database with the
keywords formulaic or chunk will pull up as many as 283 published works during
the period from 1998 to 2008. Wrays new book is a much awaited follow-up
to its predecessor Formulaic Language and the Lexicon (2002), which won the
2003 British Association for Applied Linguistics book prize. This book extends
the framework in Wray (2002) and presents cutting-edge research and new
developments in the eld. This volume, which compiles theoretical arguments
and empirical studies, is aimed at theoretical linguists, SLA researchers,