Nina Hyams received her bachelor's degree in journalism from Boston University in 1973 and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in linguistics from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 1981 and 1983, respectively. She joined the UCLA faculty in 1983, where she is currently professor of linguistics. Her main areas of research are childhood language development and syntax. She is author of LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND THE THEORY OF PARAMETERS (D. Reidel Publishers, 1986), a milestone in language acquisition research. She has also published numerous articles on the development of syntax, morphology, and semantics in children. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Utrecht and the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and has given numerous lectures throughout Europe and Japan. Robert Rodman received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1961, a master's degree in mathematics in 1965, a master's degree in linguistics in 1971, and a Ph.D. in linguistics in 1973. He has been on the faculties of the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Kyoto Industrial College in Japan, and North Carolina State University, where he is currently professor of computer science specializing in the areas of forensic linguistics, computer speech processing, and speaker verification and identification. Victoria Fromkin received her bachelor's degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles. She was a member of the faculty of the UCLA Department of Linguistics from 1966 until her death, and served as its chair from 1972 to 1976. From 1979 to 1989 she served as the UCLA Graduate Dean and Vice Chancellor of Graduate Programs. She was a visiting professor at the universities of Stockholm, Cambridge, and Oxford. Professor Fromkin served as president of the Linguistics Society of America in 1985, president of the Association of Graduate Schools in 1988, and chair of the Board of Governors of the Academy of Aphasia. She received the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award and the Professional Achievement Award, and served as the U.S. Delegate and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Permanent Committee of Linguistics (CIPL). She was an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the New York Academy of Science, the American Psychological Society, and the Acoustical Society of America, and in 1996 was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences. She published more than one hundred books, monographs, and papers on topics concerned with phonetics, phonology, tone languages, African languages, speech errors, processing models, aphasia, and the brain/mind/language interface--all research areas in which she worked. Professor Fromkin passed away in 2000, at the age of 76. Peter Collins is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of New South Wales and a former editor of the Australian Journal of Linguistics. He has taught linguistics at all levels and has published widely on grammar and discourse, Australian English, World Englishes and corpus linguistics. Mengistu Amberber is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of New South Wales and Conveynor of the Linguistics program. His main research interests include the syntax-semantics interface (with particular reference to generative grammar) and linguistic typology. Felicity Cox is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. She teaches phonetics at undergraduate and postgraduate level and has published widely on the phonetics and phonology of Australian English. Dr Cox is an author of the revised phonemic transcription system for Australian English.

Part 1: The nature of human language 1. What is language? 2. Brain and language Part 2: Grammatical aspects of language 3. Morphology: The words of language 4. Syntax: The sentence patterns of language 5. The meanings of language 6. Phonetics: The sounds of language 7. Phonology: The sound patterns of language Part 3: The psychology of language 8. Language acquisition 9. Language processing: Humans and computers Part 4: Language and society 10. Language in society 11. Language change: The syllables of time 12. Writing: The ABCs of language