C 2006 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S1366728906002471 Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 9 (2), 2006, 115–117
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The control of speech production by bilingual speakers: Introductory remarks
A L B E RT C O S TA M I K E L SA N T E S T E BA N
How much would Bill Murray have liked to be able to speak Japanese! Bill Murray’s character in the movie Lost in Translation exemplifies the way we feel when trying to communicate with someone that does not speak the same language. Often, in such cases, the exchange of information is disrupted and even translation does not seem to capture the communicative intention of the interlocutors. Thus, to be able to speak two languages at will is obviously a worthy skill to have. However, there is also a potential drawback, namely, bilingual speakers need to control their production in such a way that the two languages do not end up mixed in an inappropriate manner during the discourse. For example, if Bill Murray would have been an English–Japanese bilingual, he would have had to be careful not to use English words when speaking to the director of the commercial. This poses interesting problems to researchers in cognitive psychology: How does a bilingual speaker control her two languages during speech production? How do bilingual speakers manage to avoid massive interference from the language they are not using? What is the role of the language-not-in-use during lexical retrieval and phonological encoding? The articles included in this issue aim at discussing the answers that have been put forward to some of these questions. Of all topics covered by psycholinguistics perhaps the two most neglected are bilingualism and language production. That is, most of the research focuses on a) understanding language processing in monolingual contexts and b) discovering the mechanisms involved in the receptive side of language. As a consequence, our knowledge of the mechanisms and representations involved in bilingual language production is limited. However, and despite this limitation, in the last 10 years, the number of studies that have addressed issues related to bilingual speech production has increased considerably. This research has especially helped in sharpening theoretical questions and creating a general concurrence as to what features a model of speech production for bilingual speakers must account for. As a result, we now have a theoretical framework from which precise questions can be asked and from which detailed hypotheses and predictions can be tested. This has
been a fundamental accomplishment that hopefully will generate an increasing number of experimental studies helping to advance our knowledge of how a single mind is able to produce speech in two (or more) different languages. In this respect the emergence of the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition in 1998 has played a relevant role in providing an interdisciplinary outlet in which to discuss issues related to bilingual speech production from many different perspectives (linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, etc.). Given this state of affairs, we thought it was time to edit a Special Issue on Lexical Access in Bilingual Speech Production, where different researchers will discuss the most relevant observations and theoretical positions that have recently been put forward. Additionally, from the beginning there was never a doubt that Bilingualism: Language and Cognition was the right journal for such an issue to appear. The seven articles included in this issue are the result of this initiative. As mentioned earlier, one of the central issues in bilingual speech production refers to the mechanisms that allow bilingual speakers to control their different languages during language production. The main question here is: How do bilingual speakers manage to produce speech in the intended language while preventing massive interference from their other language(s)? This question revolves around the issue of lexical access in speech production, and more concretely, what has been called lexical selection. That is, in the course of speech production speakers need to select the words from the lexicon that match their communicative intention. Bilingual speakers not only need to ensure that the selected word corresponds to the intended concept, but also that it corresponds to the appropriate language in which the communicative act is being carried. Perhaps this is the question that has attracted most research in recent years and, as a consequence, all articles presented in this issue pay especial attention to it. In the first article, Kroll, Bobb and Wodniecka state their case for a model in which language selection does not have only a single locus. Rather, they argue that the level at which language selection is achieved depends
GRNC, Parc Cient´ıfic, Universitat de Barcelona & Hospital Sant Joan de D´eu Dept. de Psicologia B`asica, Universitat de Barcelona
Address for correspondence Albert Costa, Dept. Psicologia B`asica, Universitat de Barcelona, P. Vall d’Hebron, 171, 08035 Barcelona, Spain E-mail:
[email protected]
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A. Costa and M. Santesteban
on a set of factors that vary according to the experience of the bilingual, the demands of the production task, and the degree of activity of the non-target language. In doing so, they make an excellent review of the existing data on the issue of lexical selection in bilingual speakers. Furthermore, they try to reconcile the seemingly contradictory results by identifying the different factors that, according to the authors, may affect the level at which language selection takes place. The second contribution, from Costa, La Heij and Navarrete, focuses on the dynamics of bilingual lexical access. The basic issue assessed in this article is to what extent the lexical and sublexical representations of the non-response language are activated during lexical access. The authors offer a critical review of the experimental evidence in favor of the parallel activation of the two languages of a bilingual, both from the semantic to the lexical, and from the lexical to the sublexical levels. The authors conclude that it is somewhat premature to embrace the assumption of a parallel activation of the bilingual’s two languages. They also propose various possibilities in which this issue can be tested, and introduce the need to assess whether the bilingual system honors the principle of interactivity between levels of representation. A different and fresh look at the issue of lexical selection in bilingual speakers is found in the next article, by Finkbeiner, Gollan and Caramazza. These authors refer to bilingual lexical access as the “hard problem”, but quickly argue that the problem may not be as hard as it seems at first sight. They argue that the models that have been proposed to describe the process of lexical selection in bilinguals have difficulties in accounting for the full range of findings in the literature. In this scenario, the authors make an interesting shift of perspective, and argue that this failure may stem from the embracement of a basic (although controversial) assumption of models of monolingual lexical access: the competitive nature of lexical selection. They further argue that if one drops such an assumption, then the “hard problem” of bilingual lexical access is not so hard after all, as competition between different lexical alternatives across languages will not be present. This is an interesting novel proposal and an example of how research in bilingualism may provide useful insights into general issues of language processing in monolinguals as well. In the fourth article, Roelofs and Verhoef focus on a further step in the processes of lexical access, that in which the phonological properties of the target word are retrieved. Assuming the parallel activation of the phonological forms of words in two languages, bilinguals need to develop a control mechanism that ensures phonological encoding in the desired language (and not of the corresponding translation). They propose a bilingual control model in which condition-action rules determine what is done with the activated phonological
information depending on the target language. They further put to test this view by simulating two sets of results that have been interpreted as revealing the process of phonological encoding (the cognate facilitation effect and the between-language phonological facilitation effect of spoken distractor words in object naming). The fifth contribution, by Hernandez and Meschyan, is oriented more towards empirical findings. The authors explore the extent to which speech production in second language (L2) involves a more effortful lexical retrieval than in first language (L1). To do so, they ask participants to name pictures in either their L1 or L2, while being scanned by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). The results of the experiment reveal an increased activity in various brain areas for L2 naming, suggesting that picture naming in a less proficient L2 requires more effort to establish links between motor codes and visual forms. In the sixth article, De Groot and Christoffels discuss issues about language control in the context of simultaneous interpreting. The authors discuss how models of bilingual language production need to be adapted in order to give an account of the performance of simultaneous interpreters, and review some of the critical findings in this domain. They place special emphasis on the notion of a “global” control, where control involves the activation and/or inhibition of complete language systems, and “local” control, which has impact on a restricted set of memory representations. They further argue that bilingual control is a special case of the control of action in general, and therefore, from this perspective, simultaneous interpreters offer a unique opportunity to investigate bilingual control in general. The last contribution, by Myers-Scotton, brings the perspective of a contact linguist to this special issue. The author discusses findings and hypotheses from empirical data of naturally-occurring codeswitching that are relevant to the questions being asked by psycholinguists. In particular, the author first interprets some of the data observed in code-switching from a linguistic perspective, and then generates hypotheses that can be studied in the laboratory. This is a very productive, although at the same time, a very difficult enterprise that the author accomplishes quite nicely. The result of this collection of articles is, in our view, a rather comprehensive state of the art of lexical access in Bilingual Language Production, in terms of the review of both the experimental evidence and theoretical perspectives. Furthermore, by pointing out some the weakness of the theoretical explanations, the reader will hopefully be inspired to develop new experimental research. Finally, and although most of the contributions correspond to cognitive psychologists, an effort has been made to craft the articles in such a way that are accessible to scientists of other disciplines.
Introduction We would like to finish this Introduction by making the following reflection. Given that bilingualism is a widespread phenomenon and it is becoming the rule rather than the exception in economically developed countries, a deep understanding of the cognitive and brain mechanisms involved in language production can only be achieved if explored in the context of bilingual speakers. If we factor out such a variable from our analyses and explore questions related to speech production only from the monolingual perspective, an important part of the story will be neglected. This is an important point in the context of speech production, given that the need of controlling two languages during lexicalization involves a
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set of cognitive processes that may interact in complex ways with the linguistic system of the speaker. As a consequence, if we do not address speech production from a bilingual perspective, we run the risk of ending up with the wrong (or at best limited) model of speech production. Finally, we wish to thank all who contributed to this Special Issue, and also to the reviewers, whose comments’ and feedback guarantee the quality of the present set of articles. Also, we would like to thank the editors of Bilingualism: Language and Cognition for their enthusiasm with which the proposal was received, and especially to David Green for his advice and direction through this long process that started in November of 2003.
