Multilinguals are not multiple monolinguals. Yet multilingual assessment proceeds through monolingual norms, as if fair conclusions were possible in the absence of fair comparison. In addition, multilingualism concerns what people do with language, not what languages do to people. Yet research focus remains on multilinguals' languages, as if languages existed despite their users. This book redresses these paradoxes. Multilingual scholars, teachers and speech-language clinicians from Europe, Asia, Australia and the US contribute the first studies dedicated to multilingual norms, those found in real-life multilingual development, assessment and use. Readership includes educators, clinicians, decision-makers and researchers interested in multilingualism.

Contents: Madalena Cruz-Ferreira: Multilingualism, language norms and multilingual contexts - François Grosjean: The bilingual as a competent but specific speaker-hearer - Jason Rothman/Michael Iverson: Independent multilingualism normative assessments, where art thou? - Sharynne McLeod: Laying the foundations for multilingual acquisition: an international overview of speech acquisition - Barbara Zurer Pearson/Ana Navarro/D. Kimbrough Oller/Alan Cobo-Lewis: Early phonological development in the speech of bilingual-learning infants and toddlers: the interplay of universal and language-specific processes - Deborah Chua: Are three or more languages really too much to handle? Tracing the possibilities of multilingualism from Singaporean children's choice of adjectival comparatives - Tan Seok Hui: Multilingual infant vocabulary development in Singapore - Nala Huiying Lee: What are multilingual children actually hearing? A case study on the prosodic aspects of multilingual motherese in Singapore - Tan Ying Ying: Singing the same tune? Prosodic norming in bilingual Singaporeans - David Deterding: Norms for pronunciation of English in Singapore - Jean-Jacques Weber: Mother tongue or literacy bridge? Towards multilingual norming in education - Heather Winskel: Learning to read in multilingual contexts - Joyce Lew/Alison Cannon: SLT practices in a multilingual context: the challenges of educational, social and language policies for children with language disorders in Singapore - Annick De Houwer: Assessing lexical development in Bilingual First Language Acquisition: what can we learn from monolingual norms? - Chris Brebner: The development of the Singapore English Action Picture Test: an expressive language screening assessment for Chinese Singaporean preschool children - Madalena Cruz-Ferreira/Ng Bee Chin: Assessing multilingual children in multilingual clinics. Insights from Singapore - Li Wei: Afterword - The nature of linguistic norms and their relevance to multilingual development.

The Editor: Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Ph.D. in Linguistics, University of Manchester (UK) is an independent researcher on multilingualism, child language, phonology and intonation, and the language of science. Recent publications include books on child trilingualism, introductory linguistics and English grammar.