Research on Child Language Acquisition:
Proceedings of the 8th Conference of the
International Association for the Study of Child Language
edited by Margareta Almgren, Andoni Barreña,
María-José Ezeizabarrena, Itziar Idiazabal, and Brian MacWhinney
Overview | Contents | Preface | Order form
Preface
In these volumes, we present the final product of the 8th Conference of the International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL). This conference was held in Donostia-San Sebastián in the Spanish Basque Country between July 12th and 16th, 1999. The process of organizing this conference, which began in 1996 with the formulation to the IASCL of a proposal to hold the meetings in Donostia, now concludes with the publication of these selected works from the conference.
We devoted a great deal of attention to the process of selecting and editing papers for publication. Our call for papers yielded a total of 149 submissions. All papers were reviewed by at least two specialists in the appropriate areas. Based on the recommendations of the reviewers, 99 papers were selected for eventual publication. Authors were responsible for addressing the various requests for revisions that were provided by the reviewers.
The papers were classified into the eight major themes addressed at the conference: Bilingualism, Discourse and Pragmatics, Phonology and Phonetics, Lexicon, Syntax, Morphology, Language Disorders, and Signed Languages. The fact that some areas are much more heavily represented than others reflects the current set of interests of the members of the IASCL. Our goal as editors was to publish a set of high quality contributions that could properly reflect the intellectual success of the 8th IASCL Conference. We believe that these volumes have achieved this goal.
The original conference papers were accepted in either French or English - the two official languages of the IASCL. In addition, papers could be presented in either Spanish or Basque, the two official languages of the Basque Community. The majority of the papers published here are in English, although French and Spanish are also represented. The choice of language for publication was left to each author.
The Editorial Committee wishes to publicly thank all the people and organizations that have made this publication possible. First, we thank all the participants in the 8th IASCL Conference. Second, we thank the Organizing Committee and the Scientific Committee for helping to group submissions by category and for providing guidelines that assured a high level of scientific quality. Third, we thank the Review Committee for these volumes for working so efficiently and patiently to read and evaluate the submissions. Fourth, we would like to recognize the economic and institutional support that we received from:
* the University of the Basque Country,
* the Basque Government,
* the Spanish Ministry of Education and Culture,
* the Gipuzkoa County Council,
* the Gipuzkoa-Donostia Kutxa Bank Foundation,
* the San Sebastián-Donostia City Council, and
* the Basque Studies Society.
Fifth, Cascadilla Press has greatly facilitated the rapid production of these volumes. The CD-ROM version of the volumes allows quick and inexpensive access to the papers, whereas the hardbound library edition constitutes an archival reference work for university research libraries.
Finally, the Editorial Committee wishes to thank all of the authors represented here for contributing to this project.
December, 2000
The Editorial Committee
Margareta Almgren, Andoni Barreña, María-José Ezeizabarrena, Itziar Idiazabal, and Brian MacWhinney
Maider Huarte: Secretary of the Editorial Committee
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