Language Experience in Second Language Speech Learning: In Honor of James Emil Flege

Published to mark James Flege’s retirement, this collection of papers is a fitting tribute to one of the most influential and probably the most prolific scientists in the field of second language (L2) speech research. In 365 pages 20 papers offer discussion and present empirical findings on a wide variety of topics from the field of secondor foreign-language research, and a further 40 pages of bibliography, name and subject indexes complete a fascinating picture of present-day L2 research. Inevitably, since the book is a festschrift for an American scholar, there is a preponderance of North American or North-America-based authors among the 30 contributors (22, with 3 each based in Scandinavia and Australia, respectively, 1 in Japan and 1 in Germany). Flege’s Speech Learning Model (SLM) is at the centre – or at least is the shared focus – of a large majority of the articles. This no doubt reflects both the authors’ respect for his work and the extent of his influence in the field. As the editors write, all the central themes of pronunciation research receive attention from one or more papers. However, it is not our intention to duplicate the useful theme-orientated commentary offered by the editors in their introductory overview. We therefore try to capture the main thrust, with comments on the merits and points of special interest, of the individual papers in the order they are presented in five thematic sections, which form the structuring framework for the 20 papers. These sections are: Part I – The Nature of L2 Speech Learning, Part II – The Concept of Foreign Accent, Part III – Consonants and Vowels, Part IV – Beyond Consonants and Vowels, and Part V – Emerging Issues. It must be said, however, that the subsection titles do not necessarily capture a particular thread running through the component papers. The book is not an a priori structured work, but rather a chance collection by established scientists and colleagues of James Flege. The titles of Parts I–V must therefore be taken as only rough guides to the orientation of the papers they contain. Part I is opened by the editors’ introduction, ‘The Study of Second Language Speech: A Brief Overview’, which serves both as a laudation and as a theoretical orientation to the 19 other contributions. It adds a historical perspective to the picture of L2 research that emerges in the course of the volume and provides some hints at possible future work for those looking to continue the effort. The four other papers in Part I consider foreign-language perception from different angles. Catherine Best and Michael Tyler (‘NonNative and Second-Language Speech Perception’) provide a theoretically concentrated discussion of the similarities and differences between Flege’s SLM and their own Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM). Stressing the basically different orientation – SLM being concerned with L2 learning while PAM is a model to explain nonnative perception of a foreign language – they discuss the possible extension of PAM concepts to cover L2 phenomena. For those already familiar to some extent with the two models (though for the uninitiated the account is probably set at too high a level of abstraction), there is an illuminating contrapuntal explication of SLM postulates and PAM principles. Many of the differences in viewpoint, and possibly in the understanding of terms such as ‘phonetic’ and ‘phonological’, stem from a basic difference in as yet non-disprovable tenets, whether perception operates on concrete distal events (articulatory gestures) or mental representations (categories). The chapter by Winifred Strange (‘CrossLanguage Phonetic Similarity of Vowels’) is much more concrete in its approach, providing a discussion of different approaches to cross-language phonetic comparison – articulatory, acoustic and perceptual – with examples of acoustic and perceptual analyses. The example data are both pertinent and convincing, and underline the two main messages, namely that analyses – whether of production or of perception – have to be