Nanda Poulisse

Slips of the Tongue. Speech Errors in First and Second Language Production

This book reports the results of an extensive study of slips of the tongue produced by foreign language (L2) learners at different levels of proficiency. Thus, it provides new data which can be used to test current monolingual models of speech production and to further the development of bilingual speech production models. Moreover, it offers a new approach to the study of second language acquisition. The book contains a detailed survey of the findings of L1 slip research, including studies of slips produced by child L1 learners. It systematically compares these findings to those of the current L2 study and relates them to recent monolingual and bilingual models of speech production and to several cognitive models of second language acquisition. Special features of the book are its emphasis on methodological problems and the inclusion of the complete L2 corpus of 2000 slips of the tongue. It is expected that the book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in the areas of speech production and second language acquisition, and particularly to those who would like to test their own hypotheses using the L2 data.Summary of the contents of the book. The book provides an overview of the key findings in L1 slip research. It relates L1 findings to monolingual speech production models. It gives a detailed survey of studies of slips produced by children. It presents an up-to-date review of bilingual speech production models. It discusses recent cognitive models of second language acquisition. It gives a detailed description of an extensive research project on slips of the tongue produced by Dutch learners of English. The L2 slip corpus is tape-recorded. It discusses methodological problems in L1 slip research. It systematically compares the L1 findings to those of the L2 slip project. It relates the findings to monolingual and bilingual models of speech production and to cognitive models of second language acquisition. It makes the data available in the appendix.

Duelling Languages: Grammatical Structure in Codeswitching

Myers-Scotton’s Direlliiig Laizgirqys is a book which deals with codeswitching (CS) from a sociolinguistic, but also, and predominantly, from a linguistic and a psycholinguistic point ofviewv. The book first came out in 1993, in hardback only, but has apparently been received so well that Oxford University Press decided to bring out a new paperback edition in 1997. In fact, the word “new” is slightly misleading, since the paperback edition is an exact copy of the first edition, but a twenty page aflenvord has been added to it. In the aflenvord MyersScotton clarifies some issues that had led to misunderstandings in the earlier edition and revises certain parts to bring them in line with her current thinking. The new book, then, consists of eight chapters and an aftenvord. In Chapter I, MyersScotton states the main goal of the book: “to present a model to account for the structures in intrasential CS” (p.5). In addition, Chapter I contains a detailed description of the database used for this study, the Nairobi corpus. IVe are given an interesting description of the position of Swahili and English in Kenya, and of the sociolinguistic background of the conversations from which the codeswitches were taken. Chapter I1 offers a critical review of earlier research on CS. One of the weaknesses pointed out is that in most early research single lexemes were excluded as instances of CS. The chapter is also critical of most early proposals for structural constraints, the main problem being that they have no theoretical basis and are therefore descriptive rather than explanatory. In Chapter 111, the background for the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model is sketched. First, there is a discussion of several monolingual speech production models, notably Garrett’s (e.g., 1990) and Levelt’s (1989). Second, the distinction between the matrix language (ML) and the embedded language (EL) is introduced. A frequency-based criterion is suggested to operationalize the notion of the ML, which is defined as “the language of more morphemes in interaction types including intrasentential CS” (p. 68). Chapters IV and V constitute the t\vo most important chapters of the book since they present the MLF model and the predictions following from it. The MLF model is psycholinguistic in that it adopts some of the ideas from current work on speech production, such as the distinction between two kinds of morphemes: System morphemes and content