Abstract
This article reports the results of a study undertaken to provide data relevant to the development of a model of bilingual speech production. The data which we used for this purpose are 771 unintentional language switches which occurred in a 35-hour corpus of L2 learner English collected from 45 Dutch learners at 3 different proficiency levels. The occurrence of the language switches turned out to be related to the learners' proficiency in English. This finding is interpreted as support for a spreading activation account of lexical access in bilingual speakers in which the relative frequency of L1 and L2 words in the learner's repertoire plays an important role. We also examined whether our findings could be accommodated with Myers-Scotton's (1992) matrix language frame model for intrasentential code switching and with de Bot's (1992) suggestions to adapt Levelt's (1989) model of speaking for bilingual speech production. In general, this proved to be the case, but the data suggested it was also possible to draw some more specific conclusions. These concerned the storage of inflected word forms in the (bilingual) mental lexicon, the existence of a lexical checking device, and the relationship between lemma access and phonological encoding.
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