IMPLICATIONS
OF RECENT PSYCHOLINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENTS
FOR THE
TEACHING OF A SECOND LANGUAGE
Leon A. James
Center for Comparative Psycholinguistics
The University of Illinois
Traditional
psychological theories about language acquisition emphasize the role of
reinforcement provided by environmental agencies and view language as a set of
vocal habits that are conditioned to stimuli in the environment.Ê Imitation and practice of new forms are the
processes by which language behavior develops and generalization of learned
forms is supposed to account for the novel uses of language.Ê Recent developments in linguistics have
influenced our conception of the structure of language, hence the nature of the
knowledge that the child has to acquire.Ê
A radically now psycholinguistic theory of language acquisition has been
proposed which emphasizes the developmental nature of the language acquisition
process and attributes to the child specific innate competencies which guide
his discovery of the rules of the natural language to which he is exposed.Ê Imitation, practice, reinforcement, and
generalization are no longer considered theoretically productive conceptions in
language acquisition.Ê The implications
of these new ideas for the teaching of a second language lie in the need for
controlled exposure of the student to linguistic materials in a manner that
will facilitate his discovery of the significant features of the language.Ê "Shaping" of phonological skills,
discrimination training on sound "units" and pattern drills are
rejected in favor of "transformation exercises" at the phonological,
syntactic and semantic levels.
This paper
attempts to summarize some recently developed notions about the language
acquisition process and makes some preliminary suggestions about the
implications of these ideas for the problem of teaching a second language.Ê The original impetus in demonstrating the
shortcomings of traditional psychological and linguistic theories in the
understanding of the processes of language structure and language acquisition
must be credited to Chomsky1 (1957;
1959) who also developed new theories to cope with the problem.Ê Subsequent writers have elaborated upon this
new outlook pointing out the various specific inadequacies of the earlier
notions and making concrete suggestions for new approaches (see Miller, 1965;
Katz, 1966; McNeill, 1966; Lenneberg, 1967; Slobin, 1966; and several others;
see also the contributions in Bellugi and Brown, 1964). To appreciate fully
these new developments it is necessary to consider briefly the nature of the
inadequacy of the earlier notions on the language acquisition process.
From Surface to Base
The
traditional psychological approach to the language acquisition process was to
view it within the framework of learning theory. The acquisition of phonology
was viewed as a process of shaping the elementary sounds produced by the infant
through reinforcement of successive approximations to the adult pattern. Imitation
of adult speech patterns was thought to be a source of reward to the babbling
infant and repeated practice on these novel motor habits was thought to serve
the function of "stamping in" and automatzing them.
From these elementary phonological habits the words of the language were thought to emerge through parental reinforcement.Ê It was said that the child could better control his environment by uttering words to which the parents responded by giving the child what he wanted. The child learned the meaning of words through a conditioning process whereby the referents, which the word signaled, appeared in contiguity with the symbol thus establishing an association. The acquisition of grammar was conceptualized as learning the proper order of words in sentences. Generalization carried a heavy theoretical burden in attempts to explain novel uses of words and novel arrangements of sentences. Perceptual similarity of physical objects and relations, and functional equivalence of responses was thought to serve as the basis for generalizing the meaning of previously learned words. Similarly, generalization of the grammatical function of words was thought to account for the understanding and production of novel sentences.Ê Two aspects of this approach are noteworthy. One is that the burden of language acquisition was placed on the environment: the parents were the source of input, and reinforcement was the necessary condition for establishing the "habits." The child was merely a passive organism responsive to the reinforcement conditions arranged by agencies in the environment. The second aspect to be noted was the relatively simplistic conception of the knowledge to be acquired: sentences were conceived as orderings of words, arranged in sequential probabilities that could be learned then generalized to novel combinations.Ê A general characterization of this overall approach would be to say that the process of acquisition 'was from surface to base; that is, the knowledge represented by language learning at all levels-phonological, semantic, syntactic- was entirely based on the relations contained in the overt speech of the parents. The new approach to be discussed below can be characterized by saying that it reverses this order; that is, the burden of acquisition is now placed on the child with relatively minor importance attached to the environment as a reinforcing agency.Ê Furthermore, the approach minimizes the relations contained in the surface of language, attributing the significant information to be acquired to the underlying structure of language, which is not contained in the surface input. However, before taking up this new approach, I shall point out the specific inadequacies of the earlier approach.
The
acquisition of phonology.Ê The notion
that the child first learns the constituent elements of the adult phonemic
structure and then produces speech by associating these elements appears to be
contrary to fact.ÊÊ In the first place,
it is doubtful that speech is made up of a concatenation of physically unique
sound elements. A sound typewriter, which would convert each physically
different sound into a different orthographic type, would not produce a very
readable record (Lenneberg, 1967), because speech recognition is not simply a
process of identifying physical differences in sounds. In fact, it requires
overlooking certain acoustic differences as un- important and paying attention
to certain other features in relation to the acoustic context in which the
sound is imbedded.Ê In other words, the
"crackingä of the phonological code of a natural language involves a
process of pattern recognition and equation, not simply learning the identity
of constituent elements.Ê The first
recognizable words of a child are not composed of acoustically invariant speech
sounds (see Lenneberg, 1967).Ê
Therefore, a description of phonological acquisition in terms of
learning individual speech sounds which are then combined into words, must be
false.Ê Furthermore, it is not clear how
a notion of shaping by successive approximation can ever account for the
acquisition of sound pattern recognition and the discovery by the child of
phonological structure of a hierarchical nature.
The acquisition of meaning.Ê
It is an indication of the simplistic character of previous
behaviorist views of language that they have concerned themselves with the
problem of reference to the almost total exclusion of the semantic
interpretation of utterances.Ê Reference
deals with the relation between words and objects or aspects of the
environment.Ê Psychological theories of
meaning (or reference) were based on a philosophical system of
conceptualization which now appears to be false; namely the notion that
"words tag things" in the physical environment.Ê The adoption of such a view led to
elementary descriptions whereby a particular combination of sounds (a word) was
conditioned to an object or set of objects.Ê
When a new object having certain physical similarities to the one
previously conditioned was encountered, the learned verbal response was said to
have generalized to this new instance.Ê
More elaborate versions of this form of theorizing were developed to
account for the obvious fact that familiar words would be used in connection
with objects or situations, which had no physical similarity to the originally
conditioned object.Ê However, due to the
requirements imposed by viewing meaning as a conditioned response to a
stimulus, these later elaborations merely pushed back the locus of the
similarity from the external physical object to an internal (even though
functional) representation of that object.Ê
Thus an individual's capacity to understand the extension of the word eye
in the eye of the needle was thought of as arising from the fact that the
internal conditioned responses elicited by the word eye in the above phrase are
similar in some (unspecified) manner to the responses originally conditioned to
the word eye in such instances as this is your eye, these are my eyes, this
is the doggy's eye, etc.Ê The total
inadequacy of this kind of approach as an explanatory device is this:Ê it leaves obscure the specific nature of the
similarity of the conditioned response from the original to the extension, and
it is incapable of specifying the nature of the extension and cannot predict it
until after it has occurred.Ê Thus, the
view of reference as a conditioning process has the same shortcomings for
semantics as the view of conditioning of sequential probabilities of parts of
speech has for syntax.Ê That is, the
creative and novel use of words, which is so characteristic of language,
remains completely beyond its explanatory range.
The
difficulties attached to these behaviorist explanations of meaning can be
resolved by abandoning the notion that "words tag things" in favor of
the view that "words tag the processes by which the species deals
cognitively with its environment" (Lenneberg, 1967, p. 334).Ê This view reverses the order between the
object-stimulus and its conditioned response-process.Ê That is, rather than saying that the concept-meaning involved in the
use of the word eye is a conditioned process (external, internal, or
cortical) developed as a result of tagging various objects having certain
characteristics and experiences relating to them, this view says that the word
eye tags a class of cognitive processes developed through a categorization and
differentiation process which is independent of verbal labeling.Ê When a child (or adult for that matter) is
confronted with a new word, the new word acquires meaning only in the sense
that it comes to refer to a class of cognitive processes already possessed by
the individual.Ê Novel uses of words,
such as metaphoric extensions, are understandable to others by virtue of the
fact that human categorization and differentiation processes are similar across
the species, the word merely serving as a convenient tag whereby these
processes can be labeled.Ê The language
of stimulus-response theory does not seem to offer any particular advantages
when conceptualizing the problem in this fashion.
A conception of meaning such as the one just outlined, has certain
implications for a theory of semantics, which it might be important to state
explicitly.Ê Meaning becomes a purely
cognitive concept (as linguists of a generation ago used to believe) and semantics
represents the linguistic expression of these cognitive operations.Ê The problem of the development of meaning
becomes the problem of cognitive development, which is to say that the
dimensions of meaning-how the human species categorizes and differentiates the
universe-antedate the dimensions of semantics-how cognitive categories and
relations find expression in linguistic terms.Ê
An adequate theory of meaning must be able to characterize the nature of
this relation, namely the mapping of cognitive to linguistic processes.Ê Note that this theory includes not only
lexical (vocabulary) items, but also the morphophemic and inflectional system
of language, since the latter contain cognitive differentiations such as
present vs. past, animate vs. inanimate, definite vs. indefinite, mass vs.
count, male vs. female, plural vs. singular, and so on. It follows that an
adequate theory of semantics must concern itself not only with the vocabulary
of a language and the relation between words and things (reference) but also
with the manner in which the syntactic component of a language allows the
expression of cognitive relations (meaning).Ê
While the first aspect may be conceptualized as a closed system such as
that represented by a dictionary of a language, the second aspect is an open
system that cannot be described by taxonomy of properties or relations.Ê In other words, while it is possible to make
an inventory of all the words in a language, it is impossible to make an inventory
of all the possible usages of any single word (with the exception perhaps of
most function words).Ê An adequate
semantic theory must therefore contain at least the following two things:Ê (a) a model of human cognition specifying a
finite set of dimensions or features, probably in the form of a generic
hierarchy of increasing inclusive- ness as we move up the tree, and (b) a set
of finite rules (or transformations) specifying the possibilities of
manipulations of the elements in the tree.Ê
The description of (a) must be a general psychological theory and is
made up of "psychological or cognitive universals" as defined by the
biological capacity of the human species.Ê
The description of (b) must be a cultural and individual psychological
theory as defined by individual differences in general intelligence and in
personal experiences.
The
acquisition of syntax.Ê The failure
of behavior theory to account in any significant manner for the problem of the
acquisition of syntax can be interpreted as stemming from a failure to
recognize the complexity of the syntax of language. As long as sentences are
viewed as a sequential ordering of words or categories of words and the
phenomenon to be explained as a problem in the learning of sequential
probabilities of items or classes of items, no meaningful progress can be
made.Ê The relations among the following
eight sentences taken from Lenneberg (1967, pp. 273- 275) illustrate the
complexities of the problem to be dealt with:
(1) colorless green ideas sleep furiously
(2) furiously sleep ideas green colorless
(3) occasionally call warfare useless
(4) useless warfare call occasionally
(5) friendly young dogs seem harmless
(6) the fox chases the dog
(7) the dog chases the fox
(8) the dog is chased by the fox
If one compares sentence (1)
and (2) it is evident that (1) is grammatical while (2) is not. The difference
cannot be entirely in their meaning for, although sentence (1) is more likely
to have some meaning than sentence (2), nevertheless sentence (1) will be
judged more grammatical than sentence (2) even by the most prosaically inclined
person. Nor can it be said that the reason sentence (1) is more grammatical
than sentence (2) is that it is more familiar, since both sentences had a
frequency of zero until linguists began to use them a short while ago to make
the kind of point that is being made here.Ê
The ungrammatical string (4) has the same order of parts of speech as
the grammatical string (1), namely (adjective + noun + verb + adverb).Ê Similarly, the grammatical and semantically
interpretable sentence (3)2 has the
same order of parts of speech as the ungrammatical and semantically
uninterruptible string (2), namely (adverb + verb + noun + adjective).Ê Consequently, the transitional probability
of parts of speech in a sentence cannot account for either their
grammaticality or their susceptibility to semantic interpretation.Ê The same is true for the order of morphemes
in the sentence as shown by the fact that sentence (5) which is both
grammatical and meaningful uses the same order of bound morphemes (-Iy, -s,
-less) as sentence (2), which is neither grammatical nor meaningful. Sentences
(6) and (7) demonstrate that the particular words used offer no clue to the
meaning of the sentence.Ê Sentence (8)
can be recognized as having the same meaning as sentence (6) even though the
order of subject and object is the same as that of sentence (7) showing that
directional associations between the ordered elements are irrelevant to the
understanding of the sentence.
These various examples should suffice to convince one that
the process of acquiring language must involve a much more complex analysis
procedure than that offered by such surface relations of sentences as order of
elements and word-associations. As if this were not enough, we are confronted
with the added complication that the child is continuously exposed to both
well-formed and semi-formed and semi-grammatical sentences in the ordinary
speech of adult speakers.Ê Out of this
confused input, he has to be able to separate out the false clues from the correct
ones, yet he demonstrates this ability and succeeds in the relatively short
period of 24 months (roughly from age one-and-a-half to three-and-a-half).Ê Let us now turn to these newer formulations
of child language acquisition.
From Base to Surface
If we
discard earlier theories of language acquisition as unproductive, it is
necessary to start anew right from the beginning.Ê The study of the acquisition of grammar usually begins when the
child is at about a-year-and-a-half, the time when he begins to use two word
combinations.Ê Prior to that it is
difficult to study the childâs grammatical competence since he uses single
words, and techniques have not as yet been developed to study the child's
grammatical comprehension at that early age.Ê
Speech records of a child over successive periods offer a picture of a
changing grammar, which the psycholinguist attempts to characterize in formal
terms by giving a description of its structure at each period.Ê This approach is necessarily limited since
an inference of grammatical competence must be made from the child's speech
performance, the latter being affected by a number of variables that are not
directly relevant to grammatical competence (e.g. memory span, temporal
integration, inattention, etc.).Ê Given
this limitation, we can nevertheless inquire as to the kind of developmental
picture that emerges.
Differentiation
of general classes.Ê Children's
earliest utterances of two words (or more) exhibit non-random combinations of
words.Ê Some examples from the speech of
three children reported in the literature are the following (McNeill, 1966,
Table 1):Ê big boy, allgone shoe, two
boot, that baby, here pretty.Ê Distributional
analysis of these two-word combinations reveals that the words the child uses
at this earliest stage fall into two categories in terms of their privileges of
occurrence.Ê One of the two classes
contains a small number of words each having a relatively high frequency of
occurrence.Ê Examples of this class
include allgone, big, my, see in one child's speech, my, two, a,
green, in a second child's speech, and in a third, this, a, here.Ê The second class contains a larger
number of words and additions of new words to this class occur at a higher rate
(some examples are: beat, Mom-my, tinker-toy, come, doed).Ê Words in this second class occur by
themselves or in combination with words from the first class, whereas words in
the first class never occur alone.Ê For
these reasons, the first class was named the "pivot" class (P) while
the second class was named the "open" class (0).Ê The following notation can represent a
shorthand expression of these facts.
SÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ (P) + 0
This notation implies that the child's competence includes a rule which says that a sentence, S, can be produced by combining any two words from class P and class 0 (in that order) or, alternately, by using any single word from class 0.Ê The rule excludes such sentences made up of two words from the same class, or a sentence made up of a single word from the P class.
It is to
be noted that the rule3 for
constructing this earliest sentence cannot have been developed as a result of
direct mimicking of adult sentences.Ê
Many of the two-word combinations that this rule generates are in the
wrong order from the point of view of adult speech (e.g. allgone shoe vs.
the likely adult model of the shoe is allgone).Ê In addition, it permits combinations that
are un- likely to occur in adult speech at all (e.g. big milk).Ê Such novel (and non-adult) combinations
and the ready substitutability of words within each category are convincing
arguments that these word combinations could not be memorized limitations of
adult speech.
Distributional analysis of successive speech records of the children that have been studied shows that the words in the original pivot class begin to subdivide into progressively more differentiated categories in a hierarchical manner that can be represented as follows (based on McNeill, 1966, Fig. 1):
This representation shows
that the original pivot class (Pl) subdivided into three classes of words:Ê Articles, Demonstrative Pro- nouns, and all
the rest (P2).Ê Subsequently, P2
subdivided into three further classes:Ê
Adjectives, Possessive Pronouns, and all the rest (p3).
The
implications of this picture are extremely important.Ê Note that there is no logical necessity for the development of
grammatical distinctions to assume this particular form of development.Ê The child could have made up categories of
words on a trial and error basis, continually rearranging them on the basis of
evidence contained in adult speech.Ê He
could thus isolate a category of words that correspond to adjectives, or
articles, or possessives, until he gradually homes in on the full-fledged adult
pattern.Ê However, instead of making, as
it were, a distributional analysis of adult speech, he seems to have come up
with a progressive differentiation strategy that has the peculiar property of
being made up of a generic class at each point:Ê that is, the original pivot class must already
honor in a generic form all the future distinctions at level 2; the
undifferentiated pivot class at level 2 (P2) must contain in a generic form all
the future distinctions at level 3, and so on. In other words, the child seems
to honor grammatical distinctions in advance of the time they actually
develop.Ê How is this possible?
McNeill's conclusion is as bold as it is inevitable: the
hierarchy of progressive differentiation of grammatical categories
"represents linguistic universals that are part of the child's innate
endowment.Ê The role of a universal
hierarchy of categories would be to direct the child's discovery of the classes
of English.Ê It is as if he were
equipped with a set of templates, against which he can compare the speech he
happens to hear from his parents...We can imagine, then, that a child
classifies the random specimens of adult speech he encounters according to
universal categories that the speech exemplifies.Ê Since these distinctions are at the top of a hierarchy that has
the grammatical classes of English at its bottom, the child is prepared to
discover the appropriate set of distinctions" (McNeill, 1966, pp. 35-36).
The
assumption of innate language universals is sure to be unacceptable to current
behaviorist theories.Ê Someone is bound
to point out that one does not explain the "whyä of a complex phenomenon
by saying it is innate.Ê The fact of the
matter is, however, that the complex behavior system of any organism is bound
to be dependent upon the structural and functional properties of its nervous
system.Ê Language is a product of man's
cognition, and, as Lenneberg (1967, p. 334) points out, "man's cognition
functions within biologically given limits.äÊ
Granting the innateness of language universals, we are still left with
the task of explaining the ã howä of language acquisition.Ê The scientific investigation of language,
both from the linguist's and the psycholinguist's point of view, is to give an
adequate characterization of the structure of the child's innately endowed
"language acquisition device," the nature of its universal categories
and their interrelations.
The development of transformations.Ê The ability to manipulate
transformations constitutes an essential part of linguistic competence
according to the linguistic theory developed by Chomsky, and Lenneberg (1967)
argues convincingly that transformations are an essential aspect of
categorization processes of all biological organisms.Ê An insight into the nature of linguistic transformations can be
gained by considering the manner by which the following two sentences are
understood by an adult speaker (based on Lenneberg, 1967, pp. 286-292):
(1) they
are boring students
(2) the
shooting of the hunters was terrible
Both sentences are
semantically ambiguous.Ê The ambiguity
in sentence (1) can be resolved by a process of "bracketing", which
reveals that its constituent elements can be broken up into two different
"phrase markers,ä4 as
follows:
This phrase marker shows
that the ambiguity of the sentence lies in the fact that the word boring
functions in one case as an inflected verb-form, and in the other case, as an
adjective modifying the word students.Ê
Now consider sentence (2):Ê
it is ambiguous in at least two ways (one could say that either the
hunters need more practice or they need a funeral!).Ê Only one phrase marker description is possible for this sentence,
so we need some other process to explain its ambiguity.Ê One interpretation is related to the
sentence hunters shoot inaccurately, the other; to the sentence hunters are
shot.Ê The reason we understand the
ambiguity of sentence (2) may thus be attributed to the fact that we are able
to recognize the relation between it and two other sentences each of which has
its own distinct phrase marker.Ê This
type of relationship is the essence of transformations: they are laws that
control the relations between sentences that have "grammatical
affinity."
The early
stages of child language competence does not apparently include the ability to
perform transformations, according to McNeill (1966) who relates the impetus
for acquiring transformations to the cumbersomeness of having to manipulate the
elementary forms of sentences in the underlying structure of language
("base strings").Ê (More
extensive discussion on the development of transformations is not possible
here.ÊÊÊÊ The reader is referred to
McNeill, 1966, pp. 53-65.)
Implications for Second
Language Teaching
The view on
language acquisition that has been outlined may at first appear frustrating to
those whose inclination and business it is to teach language.Ê The claim that a child has achieved
linguistic competence by age three-and-a-half is likely to be scoffed at by the
elementary school teacher in composition.Ê
At the claim that the child through linguistic universals discovers
grammatical rules, the foreign language teacher is likely to wonder what
happened to this marvelous capacity in the foreign language laboratory.Ê In this section, I would like to examine the
implications for language teaching of the views outlined earlier on the
language acquisition process.Ê I shall
discuss a number of topics including the role of practice and imitation, the
distinction between competence and performance, and the nature of skills
involved in foreign language acquisition.
The role of
practice and imitation.Ê The
assumption that practice plays a crucial role in language acquisition has been
central to earlier speculations.Ê To
Behaviorists it is almost an axiom not to be questioned.Ê This view rests on the basic assertion that
there exists a fundamental continuity between language acquisition and the
forms of learning studied in the psychological laboratory.Ê Chomsky (1959), Miller (1965), Lenneberg
(1967), and others have questioned this view on general grounds and McNeill
(1966) questions it on more specific and reduced grounds.Ê If we grant that the language acquisition
process is guided by the child's innate knowledge of language universals, does
practice theory explain how children go about finding out the locally
appropriate expression of the linguistic universals?
Practice
theory leads to two possible hypotheses about language acquisition: one is that
when the child is exposed to a novel grammatical form, he imitates it; the
other is that by practicing this novel form, he "stamps it in.äÊ The evidence available indicates that both
hypotheses are false.Ê A direct test of
children's tendency (or ability) to imitate adult forms of speech shows that
children almost never repeat the adult sentence as it is presented.Ê A child does not readily "mimicä a
grammatical form that is not already in his repertoire as evidenced by his own
spontaneous utterances.Ê Direct attempts
by the child at imitation of adult sentences end up as recordings, as the
following examples taken from Lenneberg (1967, p. 316) illustrate:
Model SentenceÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ Child's
Repetition
Johnny is a
good boy.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ Johnny
is good boy.
He takes them for a walk.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ He take them to the
walk.
Lassie does not like the
water.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ He no like the
water.
Does Johnny want a cat?ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ Johnny wants a cat?
It has been estimated that
only about ten percent of a child's ãimitations" of adult speech are
"grammatically progressive," that is, embody a form novel to the
child.
Whatever
the means by which novel forms enter the child's speech, does practice
strengthen these responses?Ê The
evolution of the child's command of the past tense of verbs provides negative
evidence to this question.Ê In the
child's early language, the past tense of the irregular strong verbs in English
(came, went, sat) appears with high frequency relative to the
regularized /d/ and /t/ forms of the weak verbs.Ê Thus, we would expect that these much practiced irregular forms
would be highly stable, more so than the regular forms.Ê Yet evidence shows that they are in fact
less stable than the less practiced regular form, because at a certain point in
the child's development he suddenly abandons the irregular form in favor of the
regularized form and produces comed, goed, sitted.Ê This kind of discontinuity shows that the practice model is
not applicable here; rules that the child discovers are more important and
carry greater weight than practice.Ê
Concept attainment and hypothesis testing are more likely paradigms in
language development than response strength through rote memory and repetition.
This
realization ought not to lead us to pessimism about the potential usefulness of
language teaching.Ê There is
strong evidence that the attainment of grammatical rules can be facilitated by
proper presentation of speech materials.Ê
Observation of children's speech during play interaction with an adult
(usually the mother) shows that up to half of their imitations of adult
"expansions" of children's speech are grammatically progressive
(McNeill, citing data by Slobin, 1966, p. 75).Ê
An expansion is an adult's "correction" of the child's
utterance.Ê The advantage expansions
seem to hold over other samples of adult speech may be attributable to the fact
that expansions exemplify a locally appropriate expression of a linguistic
universal at a time when the child is most ready to notice such a
distinction.Ê For example, if the child
says Adam cry, and the mother expands this by saying Yes, Adam cried
(or Yes, Adam is crying-depending on her understanding of what the
child intends), the child is thereby given the opportunity to discover the
specific manner in which the past tense form (or progressive form) is expressed
in English at a time when this distinction is maximally salient to him.Ê The faster development of language in
children of middle-class educated parents may be attributable to a tendency on
the part of these mothers to expand to a greater extent than other parents.Ê However, this hypothesis needs further
investigation.
On the
distinction between competence and performance.Ê This distinction has been recognized by all psychological
theories, including behaviorist ones (see Hull's, 1943, distinction between SER
and SIR).Ê A confusion that may arise in
language behavior comes from the fact that understanding is usually (if
not always) superior to speaking and one might want to equate
understanding with competence and speaking with performance.Ê However, this cannot be the case.Ê Both understanding and speaking must be
viewed as instances of performance since the non-linguistic factors that affect
speaking (e.g. memory span, temporal integration, inattention, etc.), are
equally likely to affect understanding.Ê
We are thus confronted with the fact that one type of performance, understanding,
appears to develop before another type of performance, speaking. What may be
responsible for this?
McNeill (1966) examines the
specific claim that every grammatical feature appears first in understanding
and second in speaking and is led to the conclusion that the overall parameters
of conversion from competence to performance are simpler,
easier, and less complex in the case of understanding.Ê In order to account for this fact, he postulates
three kinds of memory span of different size or length, in the following order
of decreasing magnitude:Ê phonological
production, grammatical comprehension, and grammatical production.Ê He postulates these kinds to account for
some data by Fraser, Bellugi, and Brown (1963) showing that a child can repeat
a longer sentence than it can either understand or produce spontaneously, and
also that it can understand a longer sentence than it can produce
spontaneously.Ê The difficulty with
McNeill's hypothesis is that it equates sentence length with sentence
complexity.Ê It would seem that it is
easier to understand a long but simple sentence than a short but involved
one.Ê It would also appear that one
could understand a sentence too long to be repeated. ÊChildren show evidence of having understood sentences they cannot
(or will not) repeat (see Lenneberg, 1967, p. 316).Ê The problem may be conceptualized in a different way, as
illustrated by the following diagram:
The asymmetry between the
capacities to perform the understanding conversion as opposed to the speaking conversion
may be related to the fact that the former requires an analytic approach while
the rafter demands a synthetic capability.Ê
It may be that for humans, analytic processes are easier than synthetic
ones. One might say that it is easier to learn the art critic's job than the
artist's.
The
acquisition of foreign language skills.Ê
Let us raise the question of the specific relevance of our
discussion on first language acquisition for an understanding of second
language learning and teaching.Ê What
are the parallels to be considered?Ê
First, let us look at the argument for the differences.Ê Assuming second language acquisition which
takes place after the age of four, one may point out the following:Ê (i) the individual's cognitive development
is at & later and more advanced stage; (ii) he is already in possession of
the grammatical structure of a language which may serve to facilitate the
acquisition of a second one through transfer; (iii) he already possesses
concepts and meanings, the problem now being one of expressing them through a
new vocabulary.
The
importance of the first argument would seem to depend on the relevance of
cognitive development for the acquisition of language.Ê The view outlined in this paper is that the
necessary knowledge for language acquisition cannot be gained from
experience with the outside world and that language acquisition is dependent on
an innate endowment, which constitutes the knowledge of language
universals.Ê Hence, the imputed
advantage of advanced age and cognitive development is a dubious
proposition.Ê The two other arguments
are based on the assumption of the operation of transfer in grammatical
structure and in reference (vocabulary).Ê
What is the evidence in support of this assumption?Ê It is necessary to distinguish between two
claims about transfer theory.Ê One
refers to the general expectation that new forms of learning do not go on
independently of what the organism has learned before.Ê The truth of this statement would seem
fairly obvious and need not concern us further.Ê The second and specific claim expresses the expectation that the
learning of certain specific and identifiable elements in Task B is facilitated
(or hindered) by the previous learning of certain specific and identifiable
elements in Task A.Ê The status of this
strong claim for any type of complex learning outside the laboratory is
unknown.Ê A serious test of it in second
language acquisition would require the prior analysis of the two languages in a
form, which would identify the specific elements to be transferred at the
grammatical and lexical levels.Ê On a priori
grounds we would expect negative transfer as much as positive transfer,
assuming that transfer is relevant to the problem.Ê Carroll (1966b) claims that the Modern Language Aptitude Test
designed for English speakers predicts success in a foreign language equally
well regardless of the particular language involved.Ê This fact is difficult to explain if transfer has any overall
relevance to the language acquisition process.Ê
Nevertheless, some phonological studies on contrastive analysis reviewed
by Carroll (1966a) would seem to indicate the operation of negative transfer
effects.Ê He cites Suppes et al. (1962)
who "claim to be able to predict quite precisely from mathematical
learning theory what [phoneme] discrimination problems will arise"
(Carroll, 1966a, p. 16).
The problem is complicated
still further by the possibility that transfer effects might affect performance
and competence factors in different ways.Ê
Or, the various performance factors themselves (understanding, speaking,
reading, writing) may be affected to different degrees.Ê The same comment might be made for different
levels of performance, that is phonology, vocabulary, and syntax.Ê A further aspect to this problem is the
consideration of whether transfer effects are necessary processes or whether
the extent of their operation is dependent on the strategy with which the
learner attacks the new task.Ê An
individual who tries to "fit in" the dimensions of the new task into
the old structure may encounter different problems from the individual who
inhibits the interaction of the two tasks, if we assume that the latter
strategy is possible.Ê Finally, the fact
that it is possible to predict errors of confusion, as in contrastive analysis
of phonology, is not necessarily an indication that transfer effects will
operate in the acquisition of the new task.Ê
Thus, the fact that the [1] and [r] sounds are predictable areas of
confusion for a Japanese learning English says nothing about the way in which
he will eventually learn the distinction.Ê
It is unlikely that this distinction is learned in isolation.Ê Instead, it is more likely that the
confusion will disappear when the overall structure of English phonology is
internalized.
The above
considerations lead to a number of implications for the teaching of a second
language which I shall now take up.
1.Ê Teaching the knowledge of structure:Ê since it is clear that knowledge of
language at all levels consists of knowing patterns of relations rather than
constituent elements, the usefulness of efforts to teach the latter is in
doubt.Ê Examples of such efforts include
teaching specific sound discriminations, "shaping" phonological production,
increasing vocabulary through association of translation equivalents, and
practicing specific morphological and inflectional examples.Ê Pointing to individuals who successfully
acquired a foreign language in a course using these methods has no force of
argument, for it is quite possible that their success occurred despite these
methods rather than because of them.
2.Ê Teaching successful strategies of
acquisition:Ê Carroll (1962) has
isolated a number of factors, which are predictive of success in a foreign
language.Ê These factors may offer clues
about the strategies that a successful learner uses with the possibility that
such strategies may be taught to those who normally make no use of them.Ê One of the abilities Carroll has identified
deals with verbalization of grammatical relations in sentences.Ê The successful foreign language learner is
apparently capable of the following task:Ê
given a word italicized in one sentence (e.g. ãThe man went into the house.ä)
he can identify that word in another sentence which has the same
grammatical function (e.g. picking one of the italicized words of the following
sentence:Ê "The church next
to the bowling alley will be built in a new location next year.'').Ê We know of course that the individual is
capable of recognizing the grammatical relations in the second sentence
(otherwise he could not give it a semantic interpretation), so the ability must
be one of explicit verbalization of implicitly known rules and relations.5Ê
The teaching of such verbalizations therefore ought to
facilitate foreign language acquisition.
Another
variable identified by Carroll "is the ability to 'code' auditory phonetic
material in such a way that this material can be recognized, identified and
remembered over something longer than a few seconds" (1962, p. 128).Ê We do not know at present the specific
strategy that may be employed in facilitating this kind of coding.Ê Whatever the strategy may be; it seems
unlikely that the superior person in this task derives his advantage from a
special innate capacity. In the first place, the strategy is not related to the
ability to perceive phonetic distinctions, and second, given the biological
foundations of language capacity (see Lenneberg, 1967), we would not expect
innate differences in the general capacity of coding phonological material.
Contrastive
analysis of grammatical structure would not seem to offer particular advantages
beyond those provided by verbalization of grammatical relations and by
attention to a grammatical distinction at a time of saliency (see the effects
of expansion, discussed above).Ê
The expectation that the advantage of contrastive analysis lies in
making the contrast per se is based on an assumption of transfer for
which evidence is lacking.Ê At any rate,
the pointing up of the contrast may just as well lead to negative
transfer by facilitating the assimilation (or "fitting in")
strategy.Ê I know of no evidence that
emphasizing distinctions of incompatible responses, especially those that are
automatized, leads to a decrease in incompatibility.
3.Ê Teach habit integration and
automaticity:Ê temporal integration
of phonological skills, both of understanding and production, is a problem
independent of the knowledge of the phonological structure and transformations
of a language.Ê It would seem likely that
sensory and motor integrations of this type could be automatized through
practice and repetition.Ê The more
interesting problem would relate to the time at which automaticity practice is
likely to be valuable and to the form it is to take.Ê Reading represents a different aspect of phonological production
skill than speaking, as is well known, and practice in reading does not
represent a sufficient or necessary condition for achieving automaticity of
phonological production in speaking.
The factors that enter into
the problem of automatizing grammatical habits are not very clear.Ê Tests of speech comprehension under
conditions of noise (see for example Spolsky et al., 1966) seem to be
quite sensitive to the level of automaticity and degree of
integration achieved by a foreign language speaker.Ê They show that the problem of integration goes deeper than high
proficiency in understanding and speaking demonstrated under ordinary
conditions.Ê At the moment we do not
have available a psychological theory of sentence understanding or
production.Ê The relevance to this
problem of recent experiments on latency of various grammatical manipulations
still remains to be shown.Ê Many
language teachers seem to be convinced that pattern drills serve to automatize
grammatical habits.Ê However, it is
difficult to justify this expectation on theoretical grounds.Ê I have already argued that the semantic
interpretation of a sentence cannot be viewed as a process of sequential
analysis of categories of words.Ê Thus,
pattern drills, at best, can serve only to automatize phonological production
skills, and for this latter purpose, other methods may prove equally, if not
more, effective.Ê At any rate, if the
pattern drill argument is taken literally, namely that the structure is
automatized through practice of the specific pattern that is being repeated,
then the learner could never achieve automatized speech.Ê This consequence must follow since in
ordinary speech we use an infinite variety of patterns, and, therefore, since
the second language learner could not possibly be drilled on an infinite
variety of patterns, he could never develop automatized speech.Ê Hence pattern drill cannot possibly do what
it is supposed to do.
From a theoretical point of
view, the development of grammatical competence should be facilitated by
getting the learner to perform a set of transformations on families of
sentences (e.g. I cannot pay my rent because I am broke; If I weren't broke
I could pay my rent; Given the fact that I have no money, I cannot pay my rent;
How do you think I could possibly pay my rent if I am broke; Since I am broke,
the rent cannot be paid; To pay the rent is impossible given the fact that I
have no money; etc.).6Ê The distinction between this exercise, which
we may refer to as perhaps a "transformation exercise," and
"pattern drill" is that the first deals with the competence involved
in deep structure while the second focuses on surface structure.Ê As Rutherford7
has shown in his paper read earlier at this Convention, surface structure similarities
are completely unenlightening as to the semantic interpretation of sentences.
Ê
The notion
of transformation exercises is equally applicable to phonology and
vocabulary.Ê DeCamp has given us some
examples of practice exercises in phonological transformations in his paper
read earlier at this Convention.8Ê Exercises in vocabulary transformations are
more difficult to specify at this stage of our knowledge, but from our earlier
discussion of meaning we can perhaps anticipate giving the student a task of
this kind:Ê "Change the following
list of words using the sex transformation:Ê
boy, father, bull, sun, -which might yield: "girl,
mother, cow, moon."Ê Other
examples might include asking the student to give opposites, similars,
subordinates, superordinates, and so on, in a restricted word-association
task.Ê Semantic relations of this kind
may be responsible for the well-known psychological fact that in memory words
are organized in clusters (see, for example, Deese, 1965).
4.Ê On semi-grammatical sentences:Ê the fluent speech of most native
speakers does not consist totally (or even in the majority of instances) of
well-formed sentences.Ê One would
imagine that the imposition of a requirement to utter exclusively well-formed
sentences would seriously hinder the fluency of most native speakers.Ê The logical implication of this observation
would be that no language teacher should ever force his pupils to use only
well-formed sentences in practice conversation whether it is in the classroom,
laboratory or outside.Ê This conclusion
is not as odd as it might seem at first sight.Ê
After all, children seem to acquire the competence to produce
well-formed sentences despite the semi-grammaticality of the adult speech to
which they are continually exposed.Ê It
is important to note that semi-grammaticality does not mean randomness.Ê The reason that in most instances we are
able to give a semantic interpretation to semi-grammatical sentences lies in
the fact that we have the capacity to relate these semi-sentences to their
well-formed equivalents.Ê There must
therefore exist lawful transformations between semi-sentences and well-formed
ones.Ê We are able to understand the
speech of children for the same reason:Ê
the grammar of their utterances is generic of the later grammar of
well-formed sentences.Ê If it were not
so, we would not be able to expand (hence, understand) their utterances.
An important question poses itself at this juncture:Ê should second language teaching take specific account of the developmental stages that are likely to mark the acquisition of a language?Ê By "specific account" we mean at least the following two propositions:
First, to recognize and
allow the production of semi-sentences on the part of the learner; and second,
to expose the learner of utterances, which are grammatically progressive at
each stage but which fall short of having the full complexity of well-formed
sentences.Ê The first proposition may
already be the policy in some modern and intensive audio-lingual methods, which
encourage active speech production "at any cost, (sic).Ê The second proposition is sure to be
resisted by most teachers; yet the fact of the matter is that all "naturalä
language acquisition situations expose the learner to semi-grammatical
sentences more often than not.Ê We do
not know whether these are facilitative or retarding situations.Ê Some parents tend to talk to their children
by attempting to imitate their speech and it is sometimes said that this kind
of "baby talk" retards acquisition.Ê
The evidence on this point is simply lacking.Ê It may be, of course, that the fastest method of acquiring a
second language need not be one that replicates the conditions existing under
"naturalä language acquisition.Ê In
fact various claims for highly intensive language courses followed by
individuals with high foreign language aptitude put the time requirement for
the acquisition of a foreign language at between 250 and 500 hours of study
(Carroll, 1966a, b).Ê Compare this
figure with a minimum estimate of 3,000 hours for first language acquisitions.9Ê
Of course, the two situations are not directly comparable and the level
of competence achieved may be different (especially by measures of automaticity
and background noise, see Spolsky, et al., 1966); nevertheless, the
comparison highlights the fact that the "naturalä rate of language
acquisition process can be greatly accelerated.Ê It is important to note that although the language acquisition
capacity per se must be viewed as an innate capability shared by all
members of the species, the rate, at which language is acquired,
especially a second language, and the effectiveness with which language is used
as a communicative process are performance factors that are affected by
individual differences within the species (variations in general intelligence,
in experiences, in physical health, in motivation, etc.).Ê It is here that the concept of teaching may
assume its full importance.
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