6. Psycholinguistic Aspects of Interlanguage

Tiyas Fauziah

2201411005

Rombel 4 / 103 – 104

6.   Psycholinguistic Aspects of Interlanguage

Psycholinguistics is the study of the mental structures and processes involved in the acquisition and use of language. We will focus on L1 transfer, the role of consciousness, processing operations, and communication strategies.

L1 transfer

            L1 transfer refers to the influence that the learner’s L1 exerts over the acquisition of an L2. This influence is apparent in a number of ways. They are negative transfer, positive transfer, avoidance, and overuse.

            The habits of the L1 were supposed to prevent the learner from learning the habits of the L2. It could be predicted by identifying areas of the target language that were different from the learners’ L1, comparisons of the two languages were carried out using contrastive analysis.

Researchers have found that the transfer of some L1 grammatical features is tied to the learners’ stage of development. It is clear that the transfer is governed by learners’ perceptions about what is transferable and by their stage of development.

The role of consciousness in L2 acquisition

            When children acquire their L1 they do without conscious effort. L2 learners seem have to work hard and to study the language consciously to succed. One of the most controversial issues in SLA-the role of consiousness.

            Stephen Krashen has argued the need to distinguish ‘acquired’ L2 knowledge and ‘learned’ L2 knowledge. He claims that the former is developed subconsciously through comprehending input while communicating, while the latter is developed consciously through deliberate study of the L2.

Richard Schmidt has pointed out that the term ‘consciousness’ is often used very loosely in SLA and argues that there is a need to standardize the concepts that underlie its use. Other researchers, Krashen, have resisted the claim that input processing involves noticing. Krashen’s view is that most learners are only capable of learning fairly simple rules.

Processing operations

            Another way of identifying the processes responsible for interlanguage development is to deduce the operations that learners perform from a close inspection of their output:

·      Operating principles

The study of the L1 acquisition of many different languages has led to the identification of a number of general strategies which children use to extract and segment linguistic information from the language they hear. Dan Slobin has referred to these strategies as operating principles.

Operating principles provide a simple and attractive way of accounting for the properties of interlanguage. However, they have been criticized on a number of grounds. It is not clear how many principles are needed and the ones that have been advaced are not mutually exclusive.

·      Processing constraints

What distinguishes this work on acquisitional sequences is that it led to and was informed by a strong theory, known as the multi-dimensional model. The multidimensional model is a powerful theory of L2 acquisition in that it proposes mechanisms to account for why learners follow a definite acquisitional route.

Communication strategies

            Learners frequently experience problems in saying what they want to say because of their inadequate knowledge. In order to overcome these problems they resort to various kinds of communication strategies.

There have been a number of attempts to construct psycholinguistic models to account for the use of communication strategies. Claus Faerch and Gabriele Kasper, proposed a model of speech production which involves a planning and a execution phase. Communication strategies are seen as part of the planning phase.

Two types of computational model

Information is processed in a series of sequential steps and results in the representation of what has been learned as some kind of ‘rule’ or strategy. This is the dominant version of the computational model in SLA and is evident in much of the preceding discussion.

            The alternative type of apparatus involves the idea of parallel distributed processing. This credits the learner with the ability to perform a umber of mental tasks at the same time.

Questions :

1.    What is the meaning of contrastive analysis?

2.    What are two types of computational model?