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      First published 2009

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      ISBN 978-0-19-442197-3

      Printed and bound in China

      Preface

      The history of acceptance of new theories frequently shows the following steps: at first the new idea is treated as pure nonsense, not worth looking at. Then comes a time when a multitude of contradictory objections are raised, such as: the new theory is too fancy, or merely a new terminology; it is not fruitful, or simply wrong. Finally a state is reached when everyone seems to claim that he had always followed this theory. This usually marks the last state before general acceptance.

      I normally enjoy the process of writing a book, but this volume on the psychology of second language acquisition (SLA) has been an emotional roller-coaster at times. In fact, after I received the contract from Oxford University Press, I put off working on the manuscript for several years – I did have some good excuses, but the bottom line was that I was apprehensive about the enormity of the task: applied linguistics and second language research had clearly been shaken by a paradigmatic earthquake. This has been caused by (1) the rapidly growing influence of relevant brain research in psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, neuropsychology, neurobiology, and more generally, in cognitive (neuro)science; and (2) the emergence of new cognitive approaches to the study of language acquisition, such as connectionism, emergentism, dynamic systems theory, complexity theory, and usage/exemplar-based theories. The resulting changes in our field have been so fast and profound that the word ‘blitzkrieg’ seems oddly fitting to describe what we are currently experiencing.

      I have spent most of my professional life at the interface of linguistics and psychology, yet even I was unprepared for the sudden emergence of the multitude of new metaphors, technical terms, measurement procedures, and theoretical orientations that cognitive and neuropsychological research has brought about. My first reaction was to ignore these new developments, saying that they do not apply to my specialization area, individual difference research. However, I had to realize that applied linguists simply do not have the option of ignoring the new psychological approaches because the advances in these areas are leading to a fundamental restructuring of our knowledge base of language acquisition and language processing. Disregarding these developments would lead to the marginalization

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