For a number of years now, cognitive science has been a buzzword in SLA and in various other fields. Lip service is often paid to the concept, even though researchers remain solidly ensconced in their own disciplines. It is refreshing, therefore, to see a book that really exemplifies the concept of cognitive science. Segalowitz draws on cognitive and social psychology, linguistics, neurology, philosophy, and computer science to tackle the issue of fluency in SLA and use, and he does so in a way that is not only well informed and remarkably up to date in the various areas covered but also quite accessible for the most part to the nonspecialist.
The first chapter lays the foundation for the book, with its presentation of an adapted version of Levelt’s well-known model of the speaker and pinpoints seven places in this model where problems of fluency can occur. The rest of the book, however, is not organized according to these seven problems; instead, each chapter aims to answer one of the five “anchor questions” outlined in the first chapter.
Chapter 2 operationalizes the observable characteristics of fluency. Segalowitz discusses not only the various measures in the literature and the concept of fluency they all reflect (i.e., utterance fluency) but also the efficiency of the processes that enable this utterance fluency (i.e., cognitive fluency) and the inferences the listener makes (i.e., perceived fluency) from utterance fluency to gauge the speaker’s cognitive fluency.
The next chapter takes a step back from second language (L2) concerns and asks what cognitive fluency means from a broader perspective. It discusses fluency heuristics (i.e., how people’s fluency in processing specific stimuli helps them decide about the nature of those stimuli), transfer-appropriate processing (i.e., how the similarity of the mental processes at encoding and retrieval determines fluency), and processing flexibility (i.e., distinguishing closed skills, used in predictable environments, from open skills, used in more variable and interactive environments).
Chapter 4 deals with the specifics of fluency in L2s and emphasizes the various interpretations of the concept of automaticity. As those who are familiar with Segalowitz’s work from the last couple of decades would expect, the author stresses processing stability—operationalized as the coefficient of variation—as central to this concept. Considerable space is also dedicated here to the related concept of attention.
Although chapter 4 is most in line with what most readers would expect from a book by this author on this topic, chapter 5 will come as a surprise to many. It tries to explain how social, motivational, and attitudinal factors influence L2 fluency and draws less on sociolinguistic approaches and more on social-psychological ones, in particular Dörnyei’s theory of the motivational L2 self system. Segalowitz argues that the nature of the learner’s motivation may have a thorough influence on development of fluency, because the nature of the motivation influences the nature of the psycholinguistic processes used during communication.
Chapter 6 gives shorter accounts of the potential contributions of philosophy, computational modeling, and neuroimaging. The biggest surprise here is how neuroimaging research has paid almost no attention to fluency, and sticks to the much broader concept of proficiency.
Chapter 7 is largely a summary of the book and both provides considerable detail from what was covered before and establishes links between different issues and terminologies. The author acknowledges that a number of important concepts such as the implicit-explicit and declarative procedural distinctions as well as the role of working memory have been left out of the picture because they “would require several more chapters at least” (p. 173). He then provides a short but useful section on implications for instructed learning, in particular on what criteria instructional activities should meet if they are to promote L2 fluency.
Whether the reader is mainly looking for a summary of the most relevant literature or instead looking for suggestions for new avenues of research, this book provides an abundance of information. For such a complicated topic, the discussion is clear and concise, and the literature cited is both wide ranging and up to date. Additionally, a very useful annotated bibliography of 17 books is provided at the end. What stands out the most, however, after reading this book is that some rather obvious questions with clear practical and theoretical importance have barely been addressed (how cognitive fluency influences utterance fluency, what neuroimaging can tell us about fluency, etc.). Segalowitz’s volume is certain to provide plenty of inspiration to researchers interested in the cognitive science of SLA.
