The control of speech production by bilingual speakers: Introductory remarks

Abstract

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.