Cross-linguistic Influences in the Second Language Lexicon

This volume contains a selection of papers analyzing language transfer, a phenomenon which results from language contact in bilingual and multilingual language acquisition and learning contexts. The main focus of the volume is on the lexical aspects of language transfer.

Janusz Arabski and Adam Wojtaszek both work at the University of Silesia, Poland. Their research interests include psycholinguistics, language acquisition and linguistic pragmatics. They are the editors of Neurolinguistic and Psycholinguistic Perspectives on SLA and The Acquisition of L2 Phonology, both recently published by Multilingual Matters. The editors and the contributing authors are active members of many scientific committees and organizations devoted to the investigation of language acquisition processes, and they regularly participate in many conferences and publish extensively. The author list comprises experienced scholars as well as young and promising researchers.

Janusz Arabski is a professor of English and Chairman of the English Language Institute at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. He has published a number of books and articles in the areas of applied linguistics, foreign language learning, psycholinguistics, contrastive studies and lexicography.

This is an impressive collection of serious thought and critical analysis ranging from broad issues and their implications to more specific problems. The papers are firmly grounded in significant previous research and they present good summaries of much recent work as well. I found the topics to be intriguing, the research to be rigorous and valuable to the field, and the findings and analyses outlined in the papers as a whole to represent a perspective that is relevant and useful. This is a significant contribution to the field of second language acquisition studies.