Peggy McCardle is a research administrator at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, a pre-eminent funding agency of biomedical and behavioural research. She is responsible for a research portfolio on language, bilingualism and biliteracy development and disorders within the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Erika Hoff is a professor of psychology at Florida Atlantic University, in Davie, Florida. She studies language development and bilingualism. 

Childhood Bilingualism Research: An Introduction - Erika Hoff and Peggy McCardle
Processing Two Languages
1. Bilingual Speech Processing - J. F. Werker, W. M. Weikum, and K. A. Yoshida
2. When Infants Hear Two Languages: Interpreting Research on Early Speech Perception by Bilingual Children - A. Fernald
3. The Onset of Word Form Recognition in One Language and in Two - M. M. Vihman, J. A. G. Lum, G. Thierry, S. Nakai and T. Keren-Portnoy
Speaking Two Languages
4. Bilingual First Language Acquisition in Perspective - F. Genesee
5. Social Factors in Bilingual Development - R. E. Eilers, B. Zurer Pearson, A. B. Cobo-Lewis 
Acquiring Literacy in Two Languages
6. Developing Literacy in English-Language Learners - D. August, M. Calderon, Maria Carlo, and M. Nuttall
7. Bilingualism at School - E. Bialystok 
Perspectives on Childhood Bilingualism from Related Fields 
8. Adult Bilingualism and Bilingual Development - J. Kroll
9. Finding the Points of Contact: Language Acquisition in Children Raised in Monolingual, Bilingual and Multilingual Environment - S. Waxman 
Closing Comments
10. Multiple Perspectives on Research on Childhood Bilingualism - M. Crago
11. An Agenda for Research on Childhood Bilingualism - Peggy McCardle and Erika Hoff

This book contains reports of research on bilingualism in infants and children as well as perspectives from those involved in cross-linguistic research on language development, literacy development in bilingual children, and psycholinguistic research on bilingualism in adults. It offers a fresh multidisciplinary perspective and next steps for research on childhood bilingualism.