Chapter 10 The Role of Psycholinguistic Factors in the Development of Fluency Amongst Advanced Learners of French RICHARD TOWELL AND JEAN-MARC DEWAELE Introduction This chapter aims to increase our understanding of the potential role of various psycholinguistic factors in determining whether and how L2 learners are able to develop their ability to speak a foreign language fluently. In the first section we will present the psycholinguistic production processes that are involved. From this starting point we will be able to isolate the main psycholinguistic factors that contribute to fluency. 1 This will enable us to formulate broad hypotheses about how fluency may develop in second language learners. In the second section we will present the results of a longitudinal study which bears on these issues. Whilst it is clear that social and situational variables also make a signifi- cant contribution to fluency, the study on which we report in the second part of this chapter has limited these variables by adopting a longitudinal case-study methodology and we will therefore not discuss them here. We begin by a description of the psycholinguistic processes that underlie language production. A Model of Language Production Levelt’s (1989) model of speech production is widely accepted. It was designed as a representation of language production in a mature, monolin- gual native speaker, but de Bot (1992) has shown how it can be modified to deal with second language development. It is represented by the following diagram. 210 Focus on French as a Foreign Language The Role of Psycholinguistic Factors C:\edrive\Dewaele\dewaele.vp Friday, December 10, 2004 12:43:31 Color profile: Disabled Composite Default screen