The papers in this collection throw fresh light on the relation between language contact and contrastive linguistics. The book focuses equally on the mutual influence of linguistic systems in contact and on the language contrasts that govern the linguistic behaviour of the bilingual speaker.

The topic of this bibliography in its broadest sense is the subject of a wide range of academic disciplines. Given these circumstances, the particular associations and connotations of the terms ‘transfer’ and ‘interference’ in each of these areas are legion, with resultant differences in meaning in the disparate literature on these subjects. And yet it is, in one way or another, contact and interaction of languages in the speaker/hearer and learner, in language acquisition contexts, as well as in society in general, which is basic to these two concepts throughout the various disciplines. The discovery of this basic unitary notion is surely one of the reasons for the new interest in these phenomena. In light of all this, a bibliography cannot at present avoid being highly/ selective in order to demarcate an interdisciplinary area of research in its own right and with its own status. The establishment of such an area is one of our main aims. The focus of interest in this bibliography, admittedly, is directed towards the psycholinguistics of language contact and interaction.