An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

and Processes. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum. The volume contains various useful 
chapters on methodological issues and new issues like bilingualism and aging, and 
bilingualism and creativity.
Carroll, D.W. (1999) Psychology of Language (third edition). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth 
Publishing. Carroll’s book is a popular introductory psycholinguistics text. It covers 
basic topics on acquisition, comprehension and production and also the biological 
bases of language and the cultural context in which language is used. It is an excellent 
starting point for a reader without background in psycholinguistics or cognitive 
psychology.
De Groot, A.M.B., and Kroll, J.F. (eds) (1997) Tutorials in Bilingualism: Psycholinguistic 
Perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. This volume consists of 12 tutorial 
chapters on the psycholinguistics of bilingualism and second language acquisition. The 
chapters cover acquisition, the debate about critical periods for L2, individual differences, 

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140 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics
lexical and semantic memory, language production and reading, the neuropsychology of 
bilingualism and the consequences of bilingualism for cognition.
Kroll, J.F. and De Groot, A.M.B. (eds) (2005) Handbook of Bilingualism: Psycholinguistic 
Approaches. New York: Oxford University Press. This handbook reviews the major 
developments in the psycholinguistics of bilingualism, including chapters on recent 
neuroscience approaches.
Levelt, W.J.M. (1989) Speaking. From Intention to Articulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT 
Press. This is probably the most influential book in psycholinguistics in the last two 
decades. It contains a full description of the work on (monolingual) language production 
and a blueprint of the speaker based on that research. Although a lot of new research has 
been done since, the basic model still stands.
Nicol, J.L. (ed.) (2001) One Mind, Two Languages: Bilingual Language Processing. 
Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. This edited volume contains chapters on topics 
ranging from the control of the bilingual’s two languages, to the lexicon, language 
production and code switching, sentence parsing in two languages and sign language.
Poulisse, N. (1999) Slips of the Tongue: Speech Errors in First and Second Language 
Production. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. In this book, slips of the tongue 
of foreign language learners are described and analysed using the model presented 
in Levelt (1989) and various adaptations that have been suggested in the literature to 
apply the model to bilinguals. The transcripts and analyses are a rich source of data for 
research and teaching.
Schreuder, R., Weltens, B. (eds) (1993) The Bilingual Lexicon. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: 
John Benjamins. This edited volume contains a number of contributions that have been 
the basis of present theoretical models of bilingual processing. The papers cover a wide 
range of issues that are still relevant.
Hands-on Activity
We illustrate the psycholinguistic approach to second language acquisition by 
asking you to interpret data from a study by Talamas, Kroll and Dufour (1999). 
We will walk you through the logic, experimental design and methodology. 
Then we will present some results for you to interpret. The starting point for the 
study was the observation that high school learners of Spanish at early stages 
of acquisition often make errors of lexical form. For example, the word mujer 
which means ‘woman’ in Spanish, might be confused with the word mejor which 
means ‘best’. If the meaning of L2 words is not readily available to learners, 
then words that look or sound alike will be difficult to distinguish. Talamas et 
al. (1999) were interested in bringing this observation into the laboratory to 
see whether it could be replicated experimentally and to then investigate its 
developmental course. At what point do learners become able to access meaning 
for L2 words? (See the discussion in the chapter on the development of lexical 
proficiency in L2.)
To capture this classroom observation in the laboratory, Talamas et al. (1999) 
compared the performance of less and more proficient English–Spanish learners 

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Psycholinguistics
on a translation recognition task (De Groot, 1992). In translation recognition, 
individuals are presented with two words, one in each language. Their task is to 
decide whether the second of the two words is the correct translation of the first. 
For example, if you were shown the word man and then the word hombre you would 
respond ‘Yes’ because hombre is the correct translation of man. The experiment 
was performed on a computer and participants were tested individually. A word 
in one language appeared briefly on the screen and was followed by a word in the 
other language. The participant had to decide as quickly as possible whether the 
second word was the correct translation of the first and respond ‘Yes’ if it was and 
‘No’ otherwise by pressing one of two designated buttons. Talamas et al. (1999) 
measured both the amount of time it took participants to make their decision and 
their accuracy.
The critical conditions of the experiment involved word pairs which were 
not the correct translation of one another. Some of these pairs were simply 
unrelated words (for example, man followed by casa which means ‘house’ in 
Spanish). But others were form distractors, like the errors that students had been 
observed to produce spontaneously (for example, man followed by hambre which 
means ‘hunger’ but looks like the correct translation, hombre). A final condition 
consisted of semantic distractors which were semantically related words but 
not translation equivalents (for example, man followed by mujer which means 
‘woman’).
A summary of the conditions is shown in Table 8.1.
Translation recognition task: Is the second word the correct translation of the first word?
Condition
Example
Correct response
Correct translation
man–hombre
Yes
Incorrect translations
form-related
semantically related
unrelated control
man–hambre
man–mujer
man–casa
No
No
No