The volume explores the issue known as the thinking-for-speaking hypothesis formulated by Slobin (Reference Slobin, Gumperz and Levinson1996) for native speakers of different languages. Slobin’s idea is that different languages predispose their speakers to view and talk about events differently. The studies included in this volume make use of various elicitation tasks to explore the interaction between first (L1) and second (L2) language use going deeper into the thought processes that take place during speech production in L2, or, rather, into the coding of meaning into language form in various speech production tasks. As is characteristic of the cognitively oriented perspective, Han argues that grammatical morphemes cannot be treated as purely formal properties.
These fascinating and insightful studies provide competent reviews of the literature and tackle such issues as motion events expressed in L2 Danish by speakers of Spanish, German, and Russian in a picture description task as well as vocabulary production and recognition tasks. Hasko investigates narratives as data elicitation given to native speakers of Russian studying English to find out about their encoding of directionality in a contrastive corpus in Russian and English. Stam explores changes in the patterns of expressing motion events and the use of gestures in a longitudinal case study of a Spanish learner of English compared to native speakers of English and Spanish. Also included is a study of spatial relations in English and Spanish in native language users, a study of L2 lexical acquisition as relexification, and another study on the acquisition of the English articles by Polish learners in written tasks.
In reading the volume, certain questions come to mind. For example, is it a matter of looking at linguistic relativity, language transfer, or task-specific L1-L2 transfer? These definitional intricacies are finally addressed in Odlin’s conclusion, as he discusses the interdependence of linguistic relativity as the influence of language on cognition, language transfer as the influence of one language on another, L1 on L2 in SLA, and language transfer and conceptual transfer. This volume can be considered a must-read for SLA specialists.
