SLA research began as an interdisciplinary field, and because of this it is difficult to identify a precise starting date.[2] However, two papers in particular are seen as instrumental to the development of the modern study of SLA: Pit Corder's 1967 essay The Significance of Learners' Errors, and Larry Selinker's 1972 article Interlanguage.[3] The field saw a great deal of development in the following decades.[2] By the year 2010, second-language acquisition was studied from a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives, and there was a proliferation of different theories. However, the main two approaches were linguistic theories based upon Noam Chomsky's universal grammar, and psychological theories such as skill acquisition theory and connectionism.[3]
The term acquisition was originally used to emphasize the subconscious nature of the learning process,[4]
[Krashen (1982) made a sharp distinction between learning and acquisition, using learning to refer to the conscious aspects of the language learning process andacquisition to refer to the subconscious aspects. This strict separation of learning and acquisition is widely regarded as an oversimplification by researchers today, but his hypotheses were very influential and the name has stuck.]
but in recent years learning and acquisition have become largely synonymous.
There has been much debate about exactly how language is learned, and many issues are still unresolved. There are many theories of second-language acquisition, but none are accepted as a complete explanation by all SLA researchers. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the field of second-language acquisition, this is not expected to happen in the foreseeable future.
Learning second language depends on ability to
learn patterns
Saturday,
June 1, 2013 | 01:10 AM IST
Learning to understand and read a second
language may be driven, at least in part, by your ability to pick up on
statistical regularities, a new study has found. Some research suggests
that learning a second language draws on capacities that are language-specific,
while other research suggests that it reflects a more general capacity for
learning patterns.
According to psychological scientist and lead researcher Ram Frost of Hebrew University, the data from the new study clearly point to the latter. "These new results suggest that learning a second language is determined to a large extent by an individual ability that is not at all linguistic," said Frost.
In the study, Frost and colleagues used three different tasks to measure how well American students in an overseas programme picked up on the structure of words and sounds in Hebrew. The students were tested once in the first semester and again in the second semester. The students also completed a task that measured their ability to pick up on statistical patterns in visual stimuli. The participants watched a stream of complex shapes that were presented one at a time. Unbeknownst to the participants, the 24 shapes were organised into 8 triplets - the order of the triplets was randomised, though the shapes within each triplet always appeared in the same sequence. After viewing the stream of shapes, the students were tested to see whether they implicitly picked up the statistical regularities of the shape sequences. The data revealed a strong association between statistical learning and language learning: Students who were high performers on the shapes task tended to pick up the most Hebrew over the two semesters. "It's surprising that a short 15-minute test involving the perception of visual shapes could predict to such a large extent which of the students who came to study Hebrew would finish the year with a better grasp of the language," said Frost.
According to the researchers, establishing a link between second language acquisition and a general capacity for statistical learning may have broad implications. "This finding points to the possibility that a unified and universal principle of statistical learning can quantitatively explain a wide range of cognitive processes across domains, whether they are linguistic or nonlinguistic," they concluded.
The study was published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
According to psychological scientist and lead researcher Ram Frost of Hebrew University, the data from the new study clearly point to the latter. "These new results suggest that learning a second language is determined to a large extent by an individual ability that is not at all linguistic," said Frost.
In the study, Frost and colleagues used three different tasks to measure how well American students in an overseas programme picked up on the structure of words and sounds in Hebrew. The students were tested once in the first semester and again in the second semester. The students also completed a task that measured their ability to pick up on statistical patterns in visual stimuli. The participants watched a stream of complex shapes that were presented one at a time. Unbeknownst to the participants, the 24 shapes were organised into 8 triplets - the order of the triplets was randomised, though the shapes within each triplet always appeared in the same sequence. After viewing the stream of shapes, the students were tested to see whether they implicitly picked up the statistical regularities of the shape sequences. The data revealed a strong association between statistical learning and language learning: Students who were high performers on the shapes task tended to pick up the most Hebrew over the two semesters. "It's surprising that a short 15-minute test involving the perception of visual shapes could predict to such a large extent which of the students who came to study Hebrew would finish the year with a better grasp of the language," said Frost.
According to the researchers, establishing a link between second language acquisition and a general capacity for statistical learning may have broad implications. "This finding points to the possibility that a unified and universal principle of statistical learning can quantitatively explain a wide range of cognitive processes across domains, whether they are linguistic or nonlinguistic," they concluded.
The study was published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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