2020/1 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

 14.2 Basic psychological factors affecting second-language learning

14.2.1Intellectual processing: explication and induction

Essentially, there are only two processes by which one can learn the syntax of a second language: someone can explain rules to you, explication, or you can figure them out for yourself, induction.

14.2.1.1      Explication

The nature of explication

Explication is the process whereby the rules and structures of a second language are explained to a learner. This explanation is given in the first language of the learner. The learner is then expected to understand, learn, and apply the rule in the second language.

Why a language cannot be learned completely by explication

While parts of a second language can be learned by explication, it is impos- sible for it to be learned entirely by explication. This is because not all of the rules of any one language have been discovered and written down. Even for a language such as English, the most researched of all languages, one still finds linguistic journals discussing the concepts involved in such com- monplace features of English as tense and the article.

Explication is rarely applicable to young children

Explaining is rarely done by parents or others when children acquire a native language, yet children by the age of 4 or 5 can understand and speak most of their native language quite well. They have learned language by self- analysis, induction. You do not hear a parent saying: ‘Now, Mary, to make the plural of “dog” you add a “z” sound to the end of the word, while with “duck” you add an “s” sound. You do this, Mary, because the last sound of “dog” has a voiced consonant and the last sound of “duck” has an unvoiced one.’ Similarly, parents do not tell their children that, in order to negate a sentence like ‘John wanted some chocolate ice cream’, the negative marker, ‘not’, must occur before the verb, ‘do’ must appear before the NEG, the tense on the verb must be shifted on to the ‘do’, so that do + PAST becomes ‘did’, and ‘some’ must change to ‘any’ for agreement, so that the sentence ‘John did not want any chocolate ice cream’ will be the result. Even college students taking linguistics courses can find such explanations daunting!

Teaching simple and complex rules

However, rules that are simple can be learned by explication without much difficulty. An example of teaching a simple rule would be a case in which

a mature Korean speaker studying English would be told that there is a Subject + Verb + Object order of constituents (Korean has S–O–V). On the basis of such a description, a learner can learn relevant usable rules, though they may need practice before the rules can be applied with any speed or reliability. In such cases, explication may even be a faster means of learning than induction, since induction requires that a learner be repeatedly exposed to words, phrases, and sentences along with relevant situations that give some indication as to their meaning. Robinson (1996), for example, found that explication improved the learning of simple Subject–Verb rules.

14.2.1.2           Induction

Learning rules by self-discovery is the essence of the process of induction. The child who is exposed to second-language speech and remembers what he or she has heard will be able to analyze and discover the generaliza-  tion or rule that underlies that speech. Actually, not only must the learner devise the rule based on the speech that has been heard, but he or she must also figure out how those rules are to be applied in other cases. For example, given the sentences ‘John danced then John sang’ and ‘John danced and then he sang’, spoken in relevant situations, the learner can determine that the two sentences are related, with ‘he’ being a replacement for ‘John’. The learner must also figure out that while ‘he’ can replace ‘John’ in the second of the conjoined sentences, it cannot do  so  in  the  first  sentence  (as  in  ‘He danced then John sang’) since in that case the pronoun ‘he’ must refer to someone other than John. With such a rule, the learner is on the way      to being able to use and understand increasingly complicated structures involving pronominalization. Such phenomena as pronominalization, nega- tion, and the plural are learned by induction and become part of a young native speaker’s language knowledge quite early, long before the child enters school.

The second-language learner is always trying to figure out language by

induction. This is simply the natural thing to do. So long as the structures involved are not far beyond the learner’s level of syntactic understand-   ing, there is a good chance that the learner can discover the rules by self-analysis.

14.2.2  Memory

Vocabulary learning and rote memory

Memory is crucial to learning. It is inconceivable that a person with a severe memory impairment could ever learn his or her native language, much less a second language. The learning of the simplest word requires memory. A person learning the word ‘dog’, for example, must retain a connection be- tween the hearing of ‘dog’ and the experience of seeing, touching or smelling

a dog. Such a connection between the sound and the object is arbitrary. There is no logical relationship between the sound ‘dog’ and its meaning. Usually more than one occurrence of the sound and meaning is necessary for learning.

The greater the number of related occurrences needed for learning, the poorer a person’s memory. Second-language learners and teachers are for- ever talking of practice and review. The reason that practice and review is necessary at all is because of some lack in memory ability.

Syntax learning and episodic memory

Memory is similarly crucial for the learning of grammatical structures and rules. For example, in order to determine the type of questions that require ‘do’ (as in ‘Do you want some candy?’ but not in ‘Is the dog barking?’), how to negate sentences, how to use politeness structures (‘Please close the door’, ‘Would you please close the door?’, ‘Would you be so kind as to close the door?’), etc., memory is essential.

It is only through memory that a learner can accumulate the vast amount of speech and relevant situational data that serves as the basis for analyzing structures and formulating rules. It is not enough to remember whole phrases and sentences, the learner must also remember the situations in which these sentences were uttered in order to derive the meaning of those phrases and sentences and their syntax. The type of memory that involves situations     is what Tulving (1983) and others refer to as ‘episodic memory’. Thus, for example, outside the classroom, the degree of politeness of an utterance must be determined from the situation in which it occurs. The learner must note who is talking to whom and what their status is. This information must be remembered and associated with the different expressions, e.g. ‘Please close the door’, ‘Would you please close the door?’, ‘Would you please be so kind as to close the door?’

Children’s memory ability

Children under 7 years display a phenomenal ability at rote memorization. Older children,  however,  do  not,  with  some  decline  beginning  around  8 years of age and with more of a decline from about 12 years of age. Harley and Doug (1997) investigated students who were in an immersion language education programme (the teaching of subject matter through a second lan- guage). Older children began to apply their cognitive abilities in analyzing the syntactic rules of the second language while younger children relied more heavily on their use of rote memory for language learning. One could interpret these data as indicating perhaps that the older children jumped to syntactic analysis sooner because they realized that they had difficulty in remembering all of the sentences that they heard. In this regard, it seems that children’s ages can be usefully divided into at least two categories,

under 7 years and 7 to 12 years. This is the rough categorization that we shall use.

14.2.3  Motor skills

Articulators of speech

Good pronunciation is clearly an important part of learning a foreign lan- guage. The better our pronunciation, the better we can communicate with others. The creation of speech sounds is related to the ability to control the muscles that manipulate the organs of speech. Motor Skills is a term that psychologists use to describe the use of muscles in performing certain skills, from general ones like walking to fine ones like writing and speech. The Motor Skills that are involved in speech utilize what linguists call the articulators of speech. These include the mouth, lips, tongue, vocal cords, etc., all of which are controlled by muscles that are under the general control of the brain. The articulators of speech have to do the right thing     at the right time (open the mouth in a certain way, position the lips and tongue in a certain way, etc.), if one is to utter sounds accurately.

Decline in general motor skills

We all recognize that to be able to attain a high level of proficiency in a motor skill, e.g., gymnastics, skating or piano playing, one should start young. But why? Because somewhere around the age of 12 years, the ability to acquire new motor skills begins to decline. The reason for this decline in the fine control of the muscles of the body is as yet unknown, although, since the decline is of such a general nature, involving many muscle groups, it seems likely to be due to some change in central functioning in the brain. Hormonal changes prior to puberty may have something to do with this but this is only speculation on our part.

Decline in ability for new articulations

As we age and as our ability to acquire new motor skills declines, our ability to command our articulators of speech is negatively affected. Con- sequently, we can expect that children will do much better in the pronun- ciation of a second language than adults because children have the flexibility in motor skills that adults generally have lost.

A number of studies have demonstrated that the earlier the age at which acquisition of the second language begins, the more native-like the accent will be (Asher and Garcia, 1969; Oyama, 1976; Tahta et al., 1981). The Oyama study of Italian immigrants, for example, showed that the younger the children, the more native-like would be their pronunciation. The subjects were 60 Italian-born male immigrants who lived in the greater New York metropolitan area. The subjects were categorized according to ‘age at

arrival in the United States’ (6 to 20 years) and ‘number of years in the United States’ (5 to 20 years). It was found that the younger arrivals per- formed with near-native English pronunciation while those who arrived after about the age of 12 years had substantial accents.¹ Length of stay had little effect.

14.2.4  Summary of three important psychological factors affecting second-language learning

Let us now summarize the effects on second-language learning of the various psychological variables. In Table 6.1, three basic psychological categories are represented: Intellectual, which is subdivided into Inductive and Explicative; Memory; and Motor Skills. Along the left margin of the table, persons are divided into three age groups: Children under 7, Chil- dren 7 to 12, and Adults over 12.

l Induction. We can see that insofar as Induction is concerned, this ability remains at a relatively high level with age, except with certain individuals in old age. Such an ability allows us to make new discoveries in our

Table 6.1 Important psychological and social factors affecting second- language learning for children and adults

¹ The authors observed the same phenomenon in their own families. The first author’s father and his brothers came from Russia to Canada before the Communist revolution; however, only the youngest brother, who was 10 to 11 years old, picked up perfect Canadian English. All of the brothers, including the first author’s father, who was 17 years old when he came, always spoke English with a heavy Russian accent (as did all of the other brothers, who were older than he was). As a child, the first author was amazed that the brothers could be of the same family. The second author started to learn English as a Foreign Language in her native Russia at the age of 7 in a classroom environment before moving to the United States at the age of 33. At present, while her writing skills are good, she still speaks English with a Russian accent.

However, her son, who was only 9 years old when they came, took only a year to pick up accentless English!

everyday life, even to the extent of being able to analyze the syntactic structures of a second language. Thus the assignment of High for each age category.

l Explication. We see that this ability increases with age. Young children would have great difficulty in understanding abstract and complex explanations about a second language. We thus see a rise from Low to High on this variable.

l Memory. This is an ability in which very young children are High. Such an ability, though, declines with age and so we have assigned a Medium/ High value for ages 7 to 12 and a Medium value for Adults. One might want to assign a lower value to adults because of the great age range involved. For simplicity’s sake, we made only one category of adults. Certainly we would expect a difference in the memory ability of teenagers (13 to 19 years) as compared to persons in their thirties or forties.

l Motor Skills. The table indicates a general decline from a High for young children to Low for adults. These data reflect what research (discussed in a later section) indicates about pronunciation proficiency. It is difficult  for most adults to achieve native-speaker pronunciation. While adults may greatly improve their bowling, golf, or their billiards (these are perceptual-motor skills – a combination of perception and motor skills), most of these people will not be able to improve their pronunciation (a pure motor skill).

14.2.5  Two other important psychologial variables: motivation and attitude

14.2.5.1           Motivation

A number of factors that affect second-language learning operate only in certain types of situations. The question of motivation for learning a second language, for instance, is not likely to arise in a natural type of setting such as with a young child. A 1- or 2-year-old needs no motivation to learn a second language; given language input, the young child will automatically learn – with learning even occurring in negative circumstances. An older  child of 4 or 5 years, however, may need motivation in order to learn a second language since by that age the child may be aware of whether a language is positively or negatively regarded by others, or the child may prefer other activities.

The planned learning situation such as the classroom, however, presents a very different problem. There is an element of choice involved in attend- ing class, listening to the teacher, participating in activities, and in doing assignments. The amount of exposure that one receives and the amount     of attention and effort that one devotes to learning may be affected by  one’s motivation. Dislike of a teacher, for example, could seriously affect