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William Rutherford is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Southern California. His main educational interests have represented an intersection of research in language acquisition, in grammatical theory, and in psycholinguistic theories of language learnability. For ten years Professor Rutherford was co-general editor of the monograph series Language Acquisition and Language Disorders and in 1995 he was the recipient of a festschrift, The Current State of Interlanguage: Studies in Honor of William E. Rutherford (Benjamins). From 1998 until his retirement he was engaged in the application of computer tools in the service of computerized data-bases of L2 learner language designed to serve L2 acquisition researchers. Among his books are Second Language Grammar: Learning and Teaching (Longman) and Workbook in the Structure of English: Linguistic Principles and Language Acquisition (Blackwell). Professor Rutherford’s current interest is the potential for early education of rational inquiry as an investigative tool of the sciences and especially cognitive science (e.g. linguistics).