The role of language processing in language acquisition

Abstract

Language processing research is changing in two ways that should make it more relevant to the study of grammatical learning. First, grammatical phenomena are re-entering the psycholinguistic fray, and we have learned a lot in recent years about the real-time deployment of grammatical knowledge. Second, psycholinguistics is reaching more diverse populations, leading to much research on language processing in child and adult learners. We discuss three ways that language processing can be used to understand language acquisition. Level 1 approaches (“Processing in learners”) explore well-known phenomena from the adult psycholinguistic literature and document how they play out in learner populations (child learners, adult learners, bilinguals). Level 2 approaches (“Learning effects as processing effects”) use insights from adult psycholinguistics to understand the language proficiency of learners. We argue that a rich body of findings that have been attributed to the grammatical development of anaphora should instead be attributed to limitations in the learner’s language processing system. Level 3 approaches (“Explaining learning via processing”) use language processing to understand what it takes to successfully master the grammar of a language, and why different learner groups are more or less successful. We examine whether language processing may explain why some grammatical phenomena are mastered late in children but not in adult learners. We discuss the idea that children’s language learning prowess is directly caused by their processing limitations (‘less is more’: Newport, 1990). We conclude that the idea is unlikely to be correct in its original form, but that a variant of the idea has some promise (‘less is eventually more’). We lay out key research questions that need to be addressed in order to resolve the issues addressed in the paper.

The Generative Approach to Sla and Its Place in Modern Second Language Studies

“…Dekydtspotter & Renaud, 2014;Phillips & Ehrenhofer, 2015). In essence, the idea is that learning happens through processing failure (e.g., Carroll, 2001;VanPatten & Cadierno, 1993).…”

Structure-sensitive constraints in non-native sentence processing

“…Even more remarkable is the fact that people are also able to compute accurate meaning representations in a language they did not acquire as a native language (first language, L1) during infancy and childhood but which they started learning later in life as a second or additional language (L2). Research now acknowledges that language acquisition and the ability to process the input are closely intertwined (see, for example, Phillips & Ehrenhofer, 2015), and a better understanding of language learners' processing skills might also provide us with the better understanding of how languages are acquired.…”

L1 Explicit Instruction Can Improve L2 Online and Offline Performance

“…Some theorists argue for an even stronger, causal relation between online processing and learning (e.g. O'Grady, 2005O'Grady, , 2015; see Phillips & Ehrenhofer, 2015). That is, online processing may be a mechanism by which learning is driven and constrained, and processing difficulty (e.g.…”