Dynamics of plurilingual processing

Abstract

Introduction Chapters 4 and 5 discussed how the resources of two or more languages are employed by plurilinguals and how these convergence, transference, integration (divergence) and transversion phenomena are facilitated by typological/structural factors. This chapter considers what questions these findings pose for psycholinguistic processing models. As the present research is not informed by its own experimental studies, we will examine some existing models and studies for answers. An attempt is then made to develop an integrated model. The issues need to be considered from two points of view – how can psycholinguistic models help us understand what is going on in plurilingual language processing, and what does language contact contribute to an understanding of speech processing? Psycholinguistic studies of language contact are concerned largely with access to and storage of the languages in contact as well as with the development of the two or more languages in contact. The key issues are: What goes on in the mind when people use language? How is thought turned into language? Some speech processes can be observed more clearly in plurilinguals than in monolinguals because the former have more than one set of representational symbols. Model building in speech processing has taken much of its impetus from studies of errors. There are some correspondences between errors and the facilitation of transversion insofar as speakers are sometimes forced into saying something that they had not originally planned. However, there are also phenomena of choice and change to consider.