Blackwell Reference Online

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Speaking is one of the most useful skills that a human being acquires. This skill is acquired seemingly effortlessly, and young children at the age of five are already able to produce complex sentences to express their thoughts. As adults, we produce language on a regular basis and we experience such behavior as quite automatic and not very demanding (we produce an average of about three words per second). Despite the ease with which we produce speech, the mechanisms and representations involved are large in number and complex. The aim of this chapter is to discuss some issues related to speech production in the context of bilingual speakers. I will focus on the processing mechanisms involved in the production of speech in the context of psycho-linguistic models that try to account for or describe the cognitive processes involved in such a skill. The main issue that will be addressed in the chapter refers to the role of the language-not-in-use during speech production. I will discuss the extent to which the linguistic properties (lexical, grammatical, and phonological) of the words of the non-response language are activated during speech production, and whether their activation affects processing in the response language. In some cases, I will discuss experimental results that provide evidence in favor of or against an effect of the non-response language on the processing mechanisms ... log in or subscribe to read full text