Adults undertaking the endeavor of learning a new language can attest to the difficulty involved with producing the sounds and prosody of the target language. A principal aim of research on adult speech production is to comprehend the mechanisms and processes that differentiate adult bilingual speech development from bilingual speech that develops earlier in life. It is clear that individuals who learn an additional language in adulthood typically encounter some difficulties that early learners do not. In particular, these difficulties arise at the segmental level when acquiring novel sound categories and novel sound contrasts, as well as at the suprasegmental level when learning to produce non-native prosodic structures related to intonation, stress, rhythm, tone, and tempo. The present chapter provides a selective overview of the current state-of-the-art in adult bilingual speech production. Furthermore, this chapter considers theoretical and methodological areas for improvement, as well as avenues for future research.

In Chapter 2, we offer a theoretical frame referred to as the relational habitus (RH), which can be used to conceptualize, observe, and document how meaning-making processes are co-constructed over interactional and historical time. The RH is an ecological ensemble of relations including self, tools, tasks, and others that is intersubjectively constructed and sustained over time in formal and informal learning communities. The RH helps explain how variances in the social organization of regulatory processes are related to the structure of activities in learning arenas, the interactional processes in activities, and movement in the social and psychological spaces of these arenas. The RH encompasses three interrelated aspects of intersubjectivity: (1) an orientation to others in cultural contexts, (2) mutual perspective-taking accomplished through communication, and (3) perspective-making during learning. These aspects explain how regulatory processes emerge from and change through meaning-making by the agential actions of individuals and the situational structuring of these actions.