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Fluent speech depends on the availability of well-established linguistic knowledge and routines for speech planning and articulation. A lack of speech fluency in late second-language (L2) learners may point to a deficiency of these representations, due to incomplete acquisition. Experiments on bilingual language processing have shown, however, that there are strong reasons to believe that multilingual speakers experience co-activation of the languages they speak. We have studied to what degree language co-activation affects fluency in the speech of bilinguals, comparing a monolingual German control group with two bilingual groups: 1) first-language (L1) attriters, who have fully acquired German before emigrating to an L2 English environment, and 2) immersed L2 learners of German (L1: English). We have analysed the temporal fluency and the incidence of disfluency markers (pauses, repetitions and self-corrections) in spontaneous film retellings. Our findings show that learners to speak more slowly than controls and attriters. Also, on each count, the speech of at least one of the bilingual groups contains more disfluency markers than the retellings of the control group. Generally speaking, both bilingual groups-learners and attriters-are equally (dis)fluent and significantly more disfluent than the monolingual speakers. Given that the L1 attriters are unaffected by incomplete acquisition, we interpret these findings as evidence for language competition during speech production.

Bilingual and monolingual language processing differ, presumably because of constant parallel activation of both languages in bilinguals. We attempt to isolate the effects of parallel activation in a group of German first-language (L1) attriters, who have grown up as monolingual natives before emigrating to an L2 environment. We hypothesized that prolonged immersion will lead to changes in the processing of morphosyntactic violations. Two types of constructions were presented as stimuli in an event-related potential experiment: (1) verb form combinations (auxiliaries+past participles and modals+infinitives) and (2) determiner-noun combinations marked for grammatical gender. L1 attriters showed the same response to violations of gender agreement as monolingual controls (i.e. a significant P600 effect strongest over posterior electrodes). Incorrect verb form combinations also elicited a significant posterior P600 effect in both groups. In attriters, however, there was an additional posterior N400 effect for this type of violation. Such biphasic patterns have been found before in L1 and L2 speakers of English and might reflect the influence of this language. Generally, we interpret our results as evidence for the stability of the deeply entrenched L1 system, even in the face of L2 interference.

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