Reviews for Stimulated Recall in Second Language Research

The average rating for Stimulated Recall in Second Language Research based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-03-16 00:00:00 Humbrrto Garza Read and reviewed only for Chapter 12, High Alemannic (i.e. Swiss German), although I browsed several other chapters. High Alemannic is traditionally considered to be those dialects that say Chind for standard German Kind. Technically, the Kind/Chind isogloss is located in southern Germany, but practically speaking the bulk of the territory is German-speaking Switzerland, and Swiss dialects are generally taken to represent High Alemannic, which is the approach taken here. Beyond that, it's not easy to generalise about 'Swiss German', which, as Russ points out, is really just a placeholder name to cover a variety of very diverse dialects. 'Any dialectologist faced with the choice of describing a representative dialect of Swiss German has an unenviable task,' he says, before nevertheless doing so. The choice here is Züritüütsch, with regular illustrative excursions to Bärndütsch. My main interest was in seeing a proper description of the phonology. Here, as with other books I've seen, the assessment seems to rest mainly on Keller 1963, which, apart from the fact that it was carried out more than half a century ago, was done in Winterthur and I'm never really sure how applicable it is to the Züritüütsch that I hear down where I live on the south side of the lake. Anyway, here at least the phonemes are explained in historical terms, with brief but decent explanations of how each sound developed from Middle High German. My constant nightmare in Swiss German are the three e-sounds, [e], [ɛ] and [æ], because it's not clear to me when each is used and the last two are not distinguished in print (outside a few not-widely-used writing schemes). There is a decent description of them here, which helps. Another question I had was about the final e of verb infinitives (Swiss has lost the -n of standard German). Russ mentions in passing that it's pronounced as a schwa, but I don't understand, then, why it's so often written elsewhere as -ä. (I have tried talking to Swiss friends about this but native speakers are such unreliable sources of information for how they actually use a language. Most French people I know have no idea whether they're pronouncing -ai differently from -ait and I had close friends when I lived in South America who swore they could hear a difference between the letters b and v in spoken Spanish!) The grammatical précis is both thorough and concise. There is a very nice summary of the verb system, including the interesting way that the past participle prefix works - normally a simple g- (pronounced [k]), before lenis plosives it assimilates and changes the consonant to its fortis equivalent. So blaase 'to blow', but plaase 'blown'; gee 'to give', ggee [keː] 'given'. At the end of the chapter is a super-interesting (though not very useful to me) description of the dialect of the village of Bosco Gurin in Ticino, a linguistic island of Swiss German surrounded by Romansh-speakers. It's really weird and I kind of want to go there now. All in all, it's very nice to see this apparent confusion all laid out in a few brief comprehensible sections, and it's especially nice to have it in a book like this where quick comparisons can be made to dialects like Swabian and Bavarian. Even though its direct usefulness to me, trying to speak to my neighbours down on the Schwyz border, is somewhat limited, it helps me remember that there is a method to the madness and gives me a good framework to hang my continuing confusions and questions on. Which is really as much as I can hope for!

Review # 2 was written on 2014-08-27 00:00:00 Michael Garrison Kinda outdated but kinda useful.