This volume of 12 individual essays is an important step forward in the literature on child language development. As the title hints, the book follows Talking to children (Snow & Ferguson 1977). Both volumes focus on input and language acquisition. Talking to children demonstrated the importance of phenomenon of baby talk and dealt with the nature of speech addressed to young children and different parental conversational styles. The title Talking to adults gives an impression that this time, more attention will be paid to speech used by children to adults, but that is not what it seems to be. Rather, the contributors here focus on how children participate in discourse with participating structures more complex than dyads – that is, when the audience is “larger” than just the child's own mother, and when simplified registers are not necessarily used. The pioneering Talking to children, in contrast, was concerned mainly with dyadic interaction with a primary caretaker. The papers in Talking to adults aim to show that child's participation in such multiparty talk seems to contribute greatly to the pragmatic development of children. The 12 chapters give an overview of empirical research concerning the acquisition of various discursive skills: explanations and narratives, control talk, affect, humor, telling a joke, telling lies, and bilingualism.

One common characteristic of the articles collected in this volume is that all pay much attention to the contexts, both cultural and interactional, in which language acquisition occurs. The title of the volume might as well read “talking at meals,” since the lion's share of chapters deal with mealtime discourse (chaps. 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, and 11). This is not surprising, because meals have been one of the most frequently used interaction contexts in this field of studies (see Pan et al. 2000 for a review). Moreover, most of the articles are about family discourse. Only a few chapters (e.g., chaps. 5 and 10) focus on how children participate in peer-group interactions at kindergarten, or in classroom discourse at school (chap. 11).

One of the advantages of the book is that it brings together the work of authors with rather different sociocultural backgrounds. As a result, it includes an overview of studies made in a variety of ethnic and minority cultures with speakers of a number of languages. This offers a picture of similarities and differences of children's participation in multiparty discourse in American, Greek, Japanese, Mayan, Norwegian, and Swedish families, peer groups, or classrooms. Furthermore, some authors compare multiparty talk across several cultures (e.g., chaps. 3, 11, and 12).

The children studied are somewhat older than the children discussed in Snow & Ferguson 1977, ranging in the present instance from two years to school age. The composition of multiparties varies in the different chapters. Most frequently, it consists of the target child and his or her mother and father, and occasionally involving also the experimenter, siblings, and/or peers.

The first part of the volume deals with production of extended discourse. Diane Beals & Catherine Snow compare stories initiated and told by children in everyday natural family conversation at the dinner table with those produced when asked by the researcher. The finding that the performance of children differs between the two contexts shows that the assessment of children's storytelling abilities in a single context may be limited, and it highlights the need to study children's speech in several contexts. Vibeke Aukrust's essay compares Norwegian and American familial discourse at meals, revealing more explanatory talk in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but more narratives in the Oslo sample. Furthermore, the narrative genre appears to be more symmetrical than the explanatory genre, taking into account that narratives were provided spontaneously by both adults and children; at the same time, only two adults but no target child participated in explanatory talk. Cultural differences were also found in what was deemed worth talking about, as only the Oslo children provided narratives about school.

The second part of the book analyzes affect, humor, and poetics in multiparty talk, and the third part focuses on cultural similarities and differences in pragmatic socialization. Karin Aronsson & Mia Thorell's chapter, for instance, describes a study in which preschool-age children were asked to play the roles of adults (mother and doctor), while the adult experimenter, in turn, played the role of the child's patient. The authors are interested in how well preschoolers and young schoolchildren understand multivoicedness and a multiplicity of roles.

Hiroko Kasuya's chapter deals with language socialization in bilingual mixed-language family environments, in two English/Japanese-speaking families living in the United States. In both cases, minority language input comes mainly from mothers because the fathers' fluency in Japanese is limited. As is known from previous research, it is hard to promote active bilingualism in children in such conditions, especially when children get older and their topics of conversation become more complex. In Kasuya's chapter, the quantity of input of mother, father and child in each of two languages, and their code-switching and code-mixing, are analyzed.

Finally, chap. 12, by the editors, seeks to answer the question: What do children have to learn to function well as participants in bilingual classroom discourse? At the same time, Snow and Blum-Kulka sum up the other chapters of the volume.

To date, most research on child language socialization has been done on adult-child, usually dyadic interactions, where the more competent person (usually mother, sometimes father or some older child) instructs, guides, and corrects the child. The message of this volume is that the study of language socialization should not remain at the level of dyadic interactions but should go further into research on multiparty, multigenerational talk. The first big step on this path has been taken by the authors of this volume. Because there is still little research done from a multiadic perspective, all these articles are descriptive in nature. They demonstrate that multiparty talk seems to provide good opportunities for acquisition of various pragmatic skills.

As one reads the volume, many unsolved problems and interesting issues arise that need to be addressed in future research. How does multiparty talk contribute to the pragmatic development of children of different ages, who differ in their cognitive, interactive and linguistic skills? Do infants benefit from it, and how? What is the optimal balance between participating in multiparty talk while adults talk to each other as well as to the children present, and in dyadic interactions when child-adjusted talk is used? How, if at all, does the child who seldom has an opportunity to take part in multiparty intergenerational discourses (e.g., only child of a single mother) differ from the child who spends a lot of time in the company of more than one adult? How does socially and culturally specific multiparty talk influence pragmatic development in the child?

In sum, this volume achieves its aim to increase awareness among readers of the importance of rethinking and broadening the “social context” employed until now by most empirical research in the field of language socialization. It is thought-provoking and interesting reading for all people working in the area of language and social development in the child, but also for novices in the field.