Inquiry into signed languages has added to what is known about structural variation and language, language learning, and cognitive processing of language. However, comparatively little research has focused on communication disorders in signed language users. For some deaf children, atypicality is viewed as a phase that they will outgrow, and this results in late identification of linguistic or cognitive deficits that might have been addressed earlier. This volume takes a step towards describing different types of atypicality in language communicated in the signed modality such as linguistic impairment caused by deficits in visual processing, difficulties with motor movements, and neurological decline. Chapters within the book also consider communication differences in hearing children acquiring signed and spoken languages.

In this book different aspects of language and aging are discussed. While language spoken by and language spoken with elderly people have been treated as different areas of research, it is argued here that from a dynamical system perspective the two are closely interrelated. In addition to overviews of research on language and aging, a number of projects on this topic in multilingual settings are presented.

This book brings together international, linguistic research with a focus on interaction in multilingual encounters involving people with dementia in care and healthcare settings. The methodologies used (Conversation Analysis, Ethnography and Discursive Constructionism) capture practices on the micro-level, revealing how very subtle details may be of critical importance for the everyday well-being of participants with dementia, particularly in settings and contexts where there is a lack of a common verbal language of interlocutors, or where language abilities have been lost as a result of dementia. Chapters analyse the practices and actions employed by interlocutors to facilitate mutual understanding, enhance high-quality social relations and assure optimal care and treatment, in spite of language and cognitive difficulties, with an emphasis put on the participants’ remaining capacities, and what can be achieved between people with dementia and their interlocutors in a collaborative fashion. This book goes beyond the study of two-party communication to address multiparty and group interactions which are common in residential care and other healthcare settings and will be of interest to professionals and policy makers as well as to medical sciences and linguistics researchers and students.

This collection brings together two areas of research that are currently receiving great attention in both scientific and public spheres: cognitive aging and bilingualism. With ongoing media focus on the aging population and the need for activities to forestall cognitive decline, experiences that appear effective in maintaining functioning are of great interest. One such experience is lifelong bilingualism. Moreover, research into the cognitive effects of bilingualism has increased dramatically in the past decade, making it an exciting area of study. This volume combines these issues and presents the most recent research and thinking into the effects of bilingualism on cognitive decline in aging. The contributors are all leading scholars in their field. The result is a state-of-the art collection on the effect of bilingualism on cognition in older populations for both healthy aging and aging with dementia. The papers will be of interest to researchers, students, and health professionals.

"The New Handbook of Second Language Acquisition" is a thoroughly revised, re-organized, and re-worked edition of Ritchie and Bhatia's 1996 handbook. The work is divided into six parts, each devoted to a different aspect of the study of SLA. Part I includes a recent history of methods used in SLA research and an overview of currently used methods. Part II contains chapters on Universal Grammar, emergentism, variationism, information-processing, sociocultural, and cognitive-linguistic. Part III is devoted to overviews of SLA research on lexicon, morphosyntax, phonology, pragmatics, sentence processing, and the distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge. Part IV examines neuropsycholgy of SLA, another on child SLA, and the effects of age on second language acquisition and use. Part V is concerned with the contribution of the linguistic environment to SLA, including work on acquisition in different environments, through the Internet, and by deaf learners. Finally, Part VI treats social factors in SLA, including research on acquisition in contact circumstances, on social identity in SLA, on individual differences in SLA, and on the final state of SLA, bilingualism.

Bilinguals have reduced verbal fluency compared to monolinguals and this has been attributed to cross language interference (Rosselli et al., 2000 ; Gollan et al., 2002). To manage interference, bilinguals may rely on executive control mechanisms to suppress the non-target language. We would therefore expect the bilingual disadvantage to increase with aging and Alzheimer's disease, which are associated with declines in executive control (Perry and Hodges, 1999). To test this account, we examined bilinguals' verbal fluency with analyses of a) number of correct responses, b) within language errors (c) cross-language intrusions and two measures of executive functioning (Stroop test and Attentional Network Task ; ANT, Fan et al., 2002). In Experiment 1a, we compared matched groups of 10 young and 10 older Spanish-English bilinguals on 18 fluency categories (5 semantic and 4 phonemic categories in Spanish and English) and we examined correlations between age and older bilinguals' (N= 18) performances on both executive control and response measures. In Experiment 1b, we compared a group of older (n=15) and young English monolinguals (n=36) on the same categories as in Experiment 1a. In Experiment 2, we compared matched groups of bilinguals with AD (n=10) with normal bilinguals (n=13), on the same categories as in Experiment 1a. Supporting an interference account, age and cross language intrusions were correlated such that older-old bilinguals produced more intrusions than younger-old bilinguals and cross-language intrusion rates were positively correlated with error rates in the ANT. Also, bilinguals with AD produced more cross language errors in semantic fluency than controls particularly in the non-dominant language. Challenges for the interference model included low rates of cross-language intrusions, even in older bilinguals and in bilinguals with AD. There was little evidence suggesting that production of a nondominant language becomes more difficult in aging and AD. We propose that executive control is important for language selection and monitoring, but after language selection, there is either (a) limited competition for selection between lexical representations across languages, or (b) a specialized mechanism for controlling competition between lexical representations that is less susceptible to cognitive decline. Thus, bilingualism is mostly maintained in aging and AD.