SLA Theory - licencjat 2009.pdf - Licencjat UŚ 2009 - metodyka - asius2306

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SLA Theory

1. The behaviourist account of L1/L2 learning

From Ellis ;)

2. Noam Chomsky’s views on language acquisition

From Wikipedia

Children are hypothesized to have an innate knowledge of the basic grammatical structure common to all

human languages (i.e., they assume that any language which they encounter is of a certain restricted kind).

This innate knowledge is often referred to a s universal grammar . It is argued that modeling knowledge of

language using a formal grammar accounts for the "productivity" of language: with a limited set of grammar

rules and a finite set of terms, humans are able to produce an infinite number of sentences, including

sentences no one has previously said. He has always acknowledged his debt to Pā ṇ ini f or his modern notion

of an explicit generative grammar. This is related to Rationalist i deas of a priori k nowledge, in that it is not

due to experience.

The Principles and Parameters approach (P&P)—developed in his Pisa 1979 Lectures, later published as

Lectures on Government and Binding (LGB)—make strong claims regarding universal grammar: that the

grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world's

languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain (such as the pro-drop parameter,

which indicates whether an explicit subject is always required, as in English, or can be optionally dropped, as

in Spanish), which are often likened to switches. (Hence the term principles and parameters, often given to

this approach.) In this view, a child learning a language need only acquire the necessar y lexical i tems (words,

grammatical morphemes , and idioms), and determine the appropriate parameter settings, which can be done

based on a few key examples.

Proponents of this view argue that the pace at which children learn languages is inexplicably rapid, unless

children have an innate ability to learn languages. The similar steps followed by children all across the world

when learning languages, and the fact that children make certain characteristic errors as they learn their first

language, whereas other seemingly logical kinds of errors never occur (and, according to Chomsky, should be

attested if a purely general, rather than language-specific, learning mechanism were being employed), are also

pointed to as motivation for innateness.

More recently, in hi s Minimalist Program (1995), while retaining the core concept of "principles and

parameters," Chomsky attempts a major overhaul of the linguistic machinery involved in the LGB model,

stripping from it all but the barest necessary elements, while advocating a general approach to the

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architecture of the human language faculty that emphasizes principles of economy and optimal design,

reverting to a derivational approach to generation, in contrast with the largely representational approach of

classic P&P.

The Critical Period (CP) Hypothesis in essence contends that the ability to learn a language is

limited to the years before puberty after which, most probably as a result of maturational processes

in the brain, this ability disappears. Since Penfield & Roberts (1959), and especially since Lenneberg

(1967), this has been one of the most hotly debated issues in psycholinguistics and, generally, in cognitive

science. In an already imposing body of literature on CP there are a large variety of views on the nature of

the phenomenon (e.g. whether it is a critical, a sensitive, or an optimal period), on its origin (e.g. whether it is

caused by maturational or cognitive or some other factors), on its onset and completion times, etc. and, while

the importance of such issues is acknowledged, they will not be addressed here. The principal goal of this

paper is rather to consider some of the existing arguments against CP for second language (SL) acquisition in

a framework which, following some recent proposals (e.g. Bley-Vroman 1989, Schachter 1996), assumes

that first and second language acquisition are two fundamentally different processes.

Nowadays there seems to be a wide acceptance that there is a CP for first language (FL) acquisition,

with compelling evidence that, unless they are exposed to language in the early years of life, humans

lose the ability to learn a language, especially its grammatical system . The situation with (adult) SL

acquisition however appears to be far less clear. While it is true that very few adult SL learners achieve native

competence in the SL, some competence is nevertheless acquired, which seems to go against the notion of a

biological constraint on language learning. It is true that prepubescent learners as a rule achieve higher

levels of proficiency in the SL than adult learners and that generally only very young starters can

hope to achieve native competence in the SL . Critics of the CP hypothesis however point out that the

attested age-related decline in adult SL learning ability is too gradual to be seen as the result of a critical

period. They also point to the nature of errors which adult SL learners have been found to make: more often

than not these errors affect SL structures which are different from the learners' FL. If a biological constraint

was at play–critics have argued–then SL learners should make errors across the board, not only where the

learners' FL and SL differ.

From Ellis

The first linguistic framework with an internal focus is Transformational-Generative Grammar

(Chomsky 1957, 1965). The appearance of this work revolutionized linguistic theory and had a profound

effect on the study of both first and second languages. Chomsky argued convincingly that the behaviorist

theory of language acquisition is wrong because it cannot explain the creative aspects of our linguistic

ability. He called attention to the ―logical problem of language acquisition‖ which we discussed earlier in this

chapter, and claimed the necessity of assuming that children begin with an innate capacity which is

biologically endowed . These views have dominated most linguistic perspectives on SLA to the present day.

This framework was followed by the Principles and Parameters Model and the Minimalist

Program , also formulated by Chomsky. Specification of what constitutes “innate capacity” in language

acquisition has been revised to include more abstract notions of general principles and constraints

that are common to all human languages as part of Universal Grammar . The Minimalist Program adds

distinctions between lexical and functional category development, as well as more emphasis on the

acquisition of feature specification as a part of lexical knowledge.

2. Critical period for first language acquisition

Nowadays there appears to be a wide acceptance of the idea that FL acquisition is subject to

maturational constraints. As Long (1990: 256) points out, the homogeneity of the process in terms of onset,

rate, sequences, age of completion, level of ultimate attainment, etc. across cultures and environments

suggests that it is biologically scheduled . In addition, there is an increasing body of evidence from a variety

of sources, such as FL acquisition by linguistically isolated children (the so called feral children , among

whom the tragic Genie is the best documented case), acquisition by hearing children of deaf adults, by deaf

children of hearing adults, late acquisition of American Sign Language, etc. all of which lend support to the

CP hypothesis for FL acquisition. An excellent review of such evidence is provided in Long (1990) therefore

there is no need to go into further detail here, but a study which appeared subsequent to Long (1990), viz.

Grimshaw et al. (1998), is worth mentioning because it presents a case of a linguistically isolated deaf

individual whose linguistic deficiencies were remarkably similar to those of Genie despite the fact that he

shared none of Genie's adverse circumstances providing ―converging evidence for the existence of a critical

period for first-language acquisition‖ (p. 250).

L1 acquisition in the light of the Critical Period Hypothesis

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1990)

4. L2 acquisition in the light of the Critical Period Hypothesis

3 Critical period for second language acquisition

The issue of CP for SL acquisition is considerably less clear and remains among the most hotly

debated issues in SL research. It should be noted that a CP for SL acquisition does not necessarily follow

from a CP for FL acquisition. The latter means that there is a limited period in the early years of life when

individuals can exercise a (special) language learning ability, and if this ability is not exercised (e.g. as a

consequence of linguistic isolation during this period), it dies away and can never again be exercised. In the

case of SL acquisition, we have individuals who have successfully exercised their language ability during the

CP and have attained the normal high level of competence in their FL. The crucial question here is: does the

language ability inevitably die away after the CP irrespective of whether it has been exercised during the CP

or not? In the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, we cannot discount the possibility that, once

the language ability has been exercised, it stays alive.

1 For many, the fact that, in contrast to late FL starters, adult SL learners can achieve a very

high level of competence in the SL can be seen as evidence favoring such a position. Others have

pointed to the highly variable success rate in SL learning and the widely known fact that native

competence in the SL can only be achieved by very young starters, suggesting that maturational

constraints apply to SL learning as well .

2 There have been a number of studies (e.g. Oyama 1976; Patkowski 1980, 1994; Johnson &

Newport 1989, Thompson 1991, among others) showing a distinct advantage of young children over adult

SL learners with regard to ultimate attainment. While such studies have often been the target of severe

criticism for being methodologically flawed, no one actually seems to dispute the generalization that on

average children achieve higher levels of SL proficiency than adult learners .

According to critics of the CP hypothesis, however, this alone cannot be taken as conclusive

evidence for the existence of maturational constraints on SL acquisition. Bialystok (1997: 117) argues that

this is a descriptive generalization which may be statistically correct, but from which "nothing inevitable

follows". The crucial question then seems to be not so much whether children are more successful SL

learners than adults, but rather whether it is impossible for adult SL learners to achieve native competence in

the TL, because, as Long (1990: 274) puts it, "[t]he easiest way to falsify [the CP hypothesis] would be to

produce learners who have demonstrably attained native-like proficiency despite having begun exposure well

after the closure of the hypothesized sensitive periods". There have been several experimental studies in

recent years (Birdsong 1992, Ioup et al. 1994, Bongaerts et al. 1995, White & Genesee 1996) in which the

researchers identified–usually after rigorous screening - some highly proficient SL learners whose exposure to

the SL had only begun in adulthood, and using various experimental techniques (more often than not,

grammaticality judgements) compared their competence in the SL to that of native speakers. The results

from these studies appear to indicate that achieving native competence by adult SL learners, while

extremely rare, is not impossible , thus arguably proving that the CP hypothesis does not hold for non-

primary languages. Other serious arguments against CP for adult SL acquisition have been raised as well.

Bialystok and Hakuta (1994) re-analyse the data presented in Johnson & Newport (1989) and argue that there

is no evidence for an abrupt change in language ability after puberty, only for a very gradual decline which

‗projects well into adulthood‘ (Bialystok 1997: 122). Such findings, according to Bialystok, can hardly been

seen as evidence in favour of a biological constraint on language ability which ends around puberty or shortly

afterwards. Furthermore, Bialystok and Hakuta found that only some of the SL structures tested in the

Johnson & Newport study showed age-related effects: those were as a rule SL structures which were

different from the subjects‘ FL. On the face of it, for a CP based account of age-related differences in SL

learning, this is a rather unexpected finding as one would rather assume that a biological constraint would

affect language structures across the board. In the forthcoming discussion I will show that under the FD

hypothesis none of these arguments presents a problem for CP for non-primary languages.

Universal Grammar and its role in L1/L2 acquisition

On Universal Grammar and Language Acquisition

II. First Language Acquisition

Humans acquire their languages by two means: First language acquisition (FLA) in their childhood and

second language acquisition (SLA) after acquiring the first language. According to Hawkins (2001), the

context of FLA and SLA vary a lot:

1. In SLA, the first language, the native tongue, is already present, and can be used fluently.

2. In SLA, the functioning of the mind has maturely developed, while FLA is said to be acquired along with

the development of cognitive abilities.

3. FLA and SLA have very different input of language data.

Linguists have proposed three different systems of theories to explain the process of First

Language Acquisition.

The behavioral approach was proposed by behavioral psychologists, B.F. Skinner (1957) among

the others. The approach assumes that human infants are born with blank sheets in their minds.

After babies are born, they start to receive linguistic stimuli, which come from the talking of parents and

other people around them. They make responses by imitating the sounds they‘ve heard when they are in

need, for example, hungry, thirsty, wetting beds, or long for attention from the adults, to name just a few.

Positive reinforcements come when they make correct sounds and then be attended by adults; while negative

reinforcements arrive when the sounds they make do not meet the meanings they want to express. Through

the process of stimulation, response, and reinforcement, children gradually get in mind the

vocabulary and grammar of their mother tongue.

The behavioral approach has a great deficit . Human languages are creative, which means the

sentences humans can make are actually infinite. Humans are certainly capable of uttering or writing down

sentences, in their own native tongues, which they never have heard of or seen before. However, if they

purely have acquire their first languages through the behavioral model, since it is impossible for anyone to

receive as stimuli all those countless sentences; they should be unable to create expressions that they have

never come across before. Therefore, the model can‘t picture as a whole the process of First language

Acquisition.

Noam Chomsky (1959) challenged the behavioral model by proposing the nativist approach.

Nativism supposes that human language capacity is genetically ingrained in our species. We are born with a

language acquisition device (LAD) in our mind . McNeil (1966) proposed that LAD should include the

ability to tell speech sounds from environmental noises, and the ability to classify linguistic data into different

groups, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on. That means children are born with the ability to

know which sounds come from mommy’s talking and which sounds are not, and are able to receive

linguistic data, process them, and keep them in mind for latter production. In other words, children

use their internal inherent ability to generate their language output .

III. Universal Grammar

Following the concept of LAD, White, L. among others, proposed the idea of universal grammar,

which stated that t here was a set of common grammatical rules encoded genetically into our minds,

and therefore, shared by all languages . But it does not mean that children are born capable of speaking.

Rather, the learning or acquisition process will trigger the working of the internal, inborn universal

grammar .

1 A position often referred to as the 'exercise hypothesis' (see e.g. Johnson & Newport 1989, Long 1990)

2 A position often referred to as the 'maturational state hypothesis' (see e.g. Johnson & Newport 1989, Long

Chomsky also proposed a framework of principals and parameters, which latter become the

dominant form of Universal grammar. Principals are a finite set of rules that are the same in all human

languages. Parameters, on the other hand, are a finite set of variables diverged across languages. For example,

a principle says that all sentences in all languages have subjects. Even those sentences without obvious

subjects have their implicit subjects either semantically or syntactically. For the ―subject‖ matter, there is a

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parameter called ―Pro-drop,‖ which determines that whether, in a specific language, the subject of a sentence

should be obviously present or not.

Chomsky (1986) also proposed structure preservation principle, trace erasure principle, and

projection principle. Take the last one, for example. It dictates that ―lexical structure must be represented

categorially at every syntactic level.‖ To explain the principle with an easy example, it says that the English

verb ―strangle‖ with the semantic meaning of ―to choke to death by compressing the throat with something

(as a hand or rope)‖ (Merriam-Webster Dictionary) should, besides a subject, has an object appeared in the

sentence it is in. According to this principle, the following sentence can be ―generated:‖

6. Neurolinguistic aspects of L2 acquisition

From Introducing Second Language Acquisition

Languages and the brain

Notions that particular locations in the brain may be specialized for language functions date back at

least into the nineteenth century. Paul Pierre Broca (1861, 1865) observed that an area in the left frontal lobe

(Broca’s area) appeared to be responsible for the ability to speak and noted that an injury to the left

side of the brain was much more likely to result in language loss than was an injury to the right side.

Wernicke (1874) further identified a nearby area which is adjacent to the part of the cortex that

processes audio input (Wernicke’s area) as also being central to language processing. Some

exceptions have been found, but for the vast majority of individuals, language is represented primarily in the

left half (or hemisphere ) of the brain within an area (including both Broca‘s area and Wernicke‘s area)

around the Sylvian fissure (a cleavage that separates lobes in the brain). Subsequent research has shown that

many more areas of the brain are involved in language activity than was thought earlier: language activity is

not localized, but core linguistic processes are typically housed in the left hemisphere.

Such specialization of the two halves of the brain is known as lateralization, and is present to

some extent even in infancy (e.g. Mills, Coffey- Corina, and Neville 1993). There is increased

specialization as the brain matures and has less plasticity : i.e. one area of the brain becomes less able to

assume the functions of another in the event it is damaged. Lenneberg (1967) proposed that children had

only a limited number of years during which they could acquire their L1 flawlessly if they suffered

brain damage to the language areas; brain plasticity in childhood would allow other areas of the

brain to take over the language functions of the damaged areas, but beyond a certain age, normal

language would not be possible.

This is the Critical period hypothesis , mentioned in Chapter 2 and to be discussed below in

relation to the influence of age on SLA. Communicative functions for which each hemisphere of the brain is

primarily specialized are listed in 4.1, as suggested by L1 research reviewed in Obler and Gjerlow (1999).

IV. Universal Grammar and Second Language Acquisition

The context of First Language and Second language acquisition are quite different . The

most fundamental difference may lie in the cognition ability of the learners. The process of acquiring first

language may be accompanied by the development of cognition ability. Second language acquisition,

however, often occurs in a deliberate situation, with the cognition ability of the learner fully developed.

Whether universal grammar applies to second language acquisition as it is the case in first language

acquisition? Linguists have been long debating over this issue for a long time. Cook (1985 proposed three

possibilities using the following diagram:

In the Direct Access paradigm, “L2 learners learn exactly the same way as L1 learners; they set

values for parameters according to the L2 evidence they encounter without any other influence

(Cook, 1993).‖

In the Indirect Access paradigm, “L2 learners have access to UG through what they know of

the L1, but they start with the L1 parameter setting rather than the initial neutral or default state

(Cook, 1993).‖

In the last possibility , the UG has nothing to do with L2 learning at all. L2 learners learn the

language in the same way as learning other knowledge or skills .

If Direct Access model holds, since L2 learning is exactly the same as L1 acquiring, L2

competency should be as good as that of L1 . However, as what Schacter (1998) and Bley-Vroman (1989)

has found, knowledge of L2 is, most of the time, not as full as L1. L2 users hardly, if not to say not at all,

reach the same level of competence in their L2 as in their native tongues. Therefore, Direct Access Model

seems to fail to picture of process of L2 acquisition.

The No Access model doesn’t work in L2 learning , either. If it works in L2 learning, since L2

learning is the same as learning other knowledge and skills, and has nothing to do with UG or the first

language, the process of learning a certain L2 language should then be independent from the difference of

the learner‘s L1. That is, for a Chinese native speaker and an English native speaker, they should both feel

the same easy or the same hard to learn a third language, say French. However, evidence has shown that, if

an L2 is similar to learners‘ L1, they will feel it easier to learn than to learn another L2 which is less similar. In

the above case, the English native speaker will find it easier to learn French than the Chinese native speaker

does, because English and French are much more similar than Chinese and French are. It seems that, from

the above discussion, the Indirect Access model describes the relationship best between the universal

grammar and second language acquisition. Learners of L2, with the cognitive understanding of the

setting of the parameters of L1, intentionally and consciously set the parameters of L2 in their mind.

Therefore, it is important for L2 learners to understand and keep in mind the parameter differences

between their L1 and L2.

V. Conclusion

Language is as essential as sophisticated for human beings, although almost all humans apparently

acquire their native languages naturally and without difficulty. It is not the case in Second Language

Acquisition. The theory of universal grammar poses a fascinating and probable insight into the nature of

human languages and the nature of first language acquisition. It also provides a possible hint of the cognitive

process concerning learning a second language, by clarifying the role the native language and universal

grammar itself play in the process.

(…)

Interest in how the brain might be organized for multiple languages also dates back to the

nineteenth century (e.g. Freud 1891). The initial questions arose from observing differing patterns for the

interruption and recovery of languages following brain damage in multilinguals. Most individuals lose or

recover multiple languages equally (Paradis 1987), but some recover one before the other, and some never

recover use of one (either L1 or L2).

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