ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to acquaint the reader with the most influential theories of L1 production. Most theories of monolingual and bilingual speech production follow two main trends: the spreading activation theory and the modular theory of speech processing. Researchers working in the spreading activation paradigm assume that speech processing is executed in an interactive network of units and rules, in which decisions are made on the basis of the activation levels of the so-called nodes that represent these units and rules. The mechanism responsible for sentence production is the process of spreading activation. Nevertheless assumptions of the spreading activation models have influenced most of the research carried out on the slips of the tongue, unintentional code-switching, and the organization of the bilingual lexicon. In the lexicon, conceptual nodes are assumed to be connected to word nodes that define words, and word nodes are conjoined with morpheme nodes, which again represent specific morphemes.
