so the processing happens at the phonological level; or phonological + prosodic? what about similar languages like Spanish and Italian (there may be better examples); what about multilingual people? Learning a third+ language is easier than the second, but it is no longer an either/or situation…but since adding a third language is not as big a leap as the second, it can’t involve a whole new system for distinguishing the words.

This is really interesting. I wonder whats happening if you can’t remember the word and yet you understand it when its spoken. That seems to happen a lot for people when they are learning languages.

well– retrieval problems happen whenever something is new and fragile knowledge; the more you practice, the easier and surer the retrieval is. I suspect that is most of it. And I have to think that we file new words in a second (and first) language semantically and phonologically, as well as some context info. I am a native English speaker with adequate travel Spanish (i.e. can;t have detailed conversations with specific vocab) and I am trying to learn some Chinese. Often the Spanish word pops up and it feels like I’m retrieving, for example, ‘table[other language]., as if there is some kind of semantic tag, not just the sound of the word. Unless it is food, in which case it is French that pops up!

I grew up speaking Italian, Spanish and English and I have found it difficult sometimes to “flip the switch” so to speak. Actually the only way I can possibly describe it is by “flipping a switch” because that’s exactly how it feels like. Say for instance that I am at work speaking in English and suddenly I receive a call in Spanish… It will take me a few minutes to process my thoughts and translate them so I can communicate in Spanish… only after a few minutes I can begin to think in Spanish and be fluent. The same with other variations; Spanish-English, Italian-Spanish, etc. To have good control of a language and shorten the “flip-switching” delay I’ve found it really helpful to read an article in the language I am about to speak. For instance; I read an article from the corriere della sera before making a call to my relatives in Italy now and it has really improved my conversational skills. I wonder is this is a personal preference or if others feel the same way about it as I do. Any comments?

This is very interesting, I have a similar issue of ‘flipping the switch’ when I change from one of the three langauges I speak, English, Japanese and Italian. Before I speak Japanese I have to quietly think for a few seconds about the feeling I had when I lived there for 10 years, I am trying to ‘channel’ the cultural context I guess, as those cultural aspects are so important.Because Japanese ‘feels’ so different from English and Italian I imagine that language is stored in a separate container, like the freezer.. whereas Italian is definitely the apples vs oranges dichotomy in my mind. There are some odd instances, like the other night when I was having a conversation in Italian and I couldn’t remember the name of a famous historical figure.. I had never thought of that person in Italian before, so I had to quickly scan my English speaking area to pick up the name (which was ironically of a Frenchman, Marshall Petain).
Thank you for a nice article by the way, Mark

I speak French reasonably fluently and rarely have problems flipping between French and English, but, with Italian and Spanish which I can ‘get by’ in, I have real problems of not actually knowing in which language is the word I come up with. Ironically, I seem to speak better Spanish in Italy and vice versa! I realise that the similarity of the two languages doesn’t help this confusion. Sometimes, I can use a French word as a good base for ‘guestimating’ the Spanish or Italian. The other night I dreamt in English, French and Spanish and, in my dreams, the foreign language always seems to be perfectly constructed! Wishful thinking, perhaps.

Some of the above comments lead to point out that initial Vitevitch’s study was conducted with a couple of languages with few to no “genetical” (knee down and beg your pardon) similarity while testimonials – and I sum my personal one – go to added difficulties for, say spanish / italian couple.
So if no “label” issue… could lexical / phonological mumble-jumble argue ?

2nd language = “foreign” language, so beginning to learn a 3rd results in confusions between the two similarly tagged “foreign” languages. My searches for Japanese words (3rd) would bring up German (2nd) despite the two languages’ lack of similarity.

Billingual eople who experience CVAs (sroke) may have their languages differentially affected. But all kindsof peculiar things happen with these conditions, like the famous (but very exotic/rare) acquisition of a foreign accent. sometimes the first language is better preserved, but sometimes it is verbs that are spared in one language and nouns in another– or different semantic categories. I can’t imagine that English is in this ‘place’ and French in that– I don’t think localization is that concrete. Maybe there is some sort of root semantic/syntactic machine, that can have a filter for each language? There must be acutal fMRIs and PET studies; this is just blue-sky thinking.