Grs LX 700 Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theory Week 12. Language Universals, and the beginnings of a model

GRS LX 700 Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theory

• Week 12. Language Universals, and the beginnings of a model

Typological universals

• 1960’s and 1970’s saw a lot of activity aimed at identifying language universals, properties of Language.

• Class of possible languages is smaller than you might think.

• If a language has one property (A), it will necessarily have another (B).

• +A+B, –A–B, –A+B but never +A–B.

(Typological) universals

• All languages have vowels.

• If a language has VSO as its basic word order, then it has prepositions (vs. postpositions).

Markedness

• Having duals implies having plurals

• Having plurals says nothing about having duals.

• Having duals is marked—infrequent, more complex. Having plurals is (relative to having duals) unmarked.

• Generally markedness is in terms of comparable dimensions, but you could also say that being VSO is marked relative to having prepositions.

Markedness

• “Markedness” actually has been used in a couple of different ways, although they share a common core.

• Marked: More unlikely, in some sense.

• Unmarked: More likely, in some sense.

• You have to “mark” something marked; unmarked is what you get if you don’t say anything extra.

“Unlikeliness”

• Typological/crosslinguistic infrequency.

• VOS word order is marked.

• More complex constructions.

• [ts] is more marked than [t].

• The non-default setting of a parameter.

• Non-null subjects?

• Language-specific/idiosyncratic features.

• Vs. UG/universal features…?

Berlin & Kay 1969: Color terms

• (On the boundaries of psychophysics, linguistics, anthropology, and with issues about its interpretation, but still…)

• Basic color terms across languages.

• It turns out that languages differ in how many color terms count as basic. (blueish, salmon-colored, crimson, blond, … are not basic).

Berlin & Kay 1969: Color terms

• The segmentation of experience by speech symbols is essentially arbitrary. The different sets of words for color in various languages are perhaps the best ready evidence for such essential arbitrariness. For example, in a high percentage of African languages, there are only three “color words,” corresponding to our white, black, red, which nevertheless divide up the entire spectrum. In the Tarahumara language of Mexico, there are five basic color words, and here “blue” and “green” are subsumed under a single term.

• Eugene Nida (1959)

Berlin & Kay 1969: Color terms

• Arabic (Lebanon)

• Bulgarian (Bulgaria)

• Catalan (Spain)

• Cantonese (China)

• Mandarin (China)

• English (US)

• Hebrew (Israel)

• Hungarian (Hungary)

• Ibibo (Nigeria)

• Indonesian (Indonesia)

Eleven possible basic color terms

• White, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, gray.

• All languages contain term for white and black.

• Has 3 terms, contains a term for red.

• Has 4 terms, contains green or yellow.

• Has 5 terms, contains both green and yellow.

• Has 6 terms, contains blue.

• Has 7 terms, contains brown.

• Has 8 or more terms, chosen from {purple, pink, orange, gray}

Color hierarchy

• White, black

• Red

• Green, yellow

• Blue

• Brown

• Purple, pink, orange, gray

• Even assuming these 11 basic color terms, there should be 2048 possible sets—but only 22 (1%) are attested.

Color terms

• BW Jalé (New Guinea) ‘brilliant’ vs. ‘dull’

• BWR Tiv (Nigeria), Australian aboriginals in Seven Rivers District, Queensland.

• BWRG Ibibo (Nigeria), Hanunóo (Philippines)

• BWRY Ibo (Nigeria), Fitzroy River people (Queensland)

• BWRYG Tzeltal (Mexico), Daza (eastern Nigeria)

• BWRYGU Plains Tamil (South India), Nupe (Nigeria), Mandarin?

• BWRYGUO Nez Perce (Washington), Malayalam (southern India)

Color terms

• Interesting questions abound, including why this order, why these eleven—and there are potential reasons for it that can be drawn from the perception of color spaces which we will not attempt here.

• The point is: This is a fact about Language: If you have a basic color term for blue, you also have basic color terms for black, white, red, green, and yellow.

Implicational hierarchy

• This is a ranking of markedness or an implicational hierarchy.

• Having blue is more marked than having (any or all of) yellow, green, red, white, and black.

• Having green is more marked than having red…

• Like a set of implicational universals…

• Blue implies yellow Brown implies blue
• Blue implies green Pink implies brown
• Yellow or green imply red Orange implies brown
• Red implies black Gray implies brown
• Red implies white Purple implies brown

L2A?

• Our overarching theme: How much is L2/IL like a L1?

• Do IL/L2 languages obey the language universals that hold of native languages?

• This question is slightly less theory-laden than the questions we were asking about principles and parameters, although it’s similar…

• To my knowledge nobody has studied L2 acquisitions of color terms…

Question formation

• Declarative: John will buy coffee.

• Wh-inversion: What will John buy?

• Wh-fronting: What will John buy?

• Yes/No-inversion: Will John buy coffee?

• Greenberg (1963):

• Wh-inversion implies Wh-fronting.
• Yes/No-inversion implies Wh-inversion.

Wh-inversionWh-fronting

• English, German: Both.

• What will John buy?

• Japanese Korean: neither.

• John will buy what?

• Finnish: Wh-fronting only.

• What John will buy?

• Unattested: Wh-inversion only.

• *Will John buy what?

Y/N-inversionWh-inversion

• English: Both

• Will John buy coffee? What will John buy?

• Japanese: Neither

• John will buy coffee? John will buy what?

• Lithuanian: Wh-inversion only.

• John will buy coffee? What will John buy?

• Unattested: Y/N-inversion only.

• Will John buy coffee? What John will buy?

Eckman, Moravcsik, Wirth (1989)

• L1: Korean (4), Japanese (6), Turkish (4)

• L2: English

• Note L1s chosen because they are neither/neither type languages, to avoid questions of transfer.

• Subjects tried to determine what was going on in a scene by asking questions.

Eckman, Moravcsik, Wirth (1989)

• Example Y/N Qs:

• Did she finished two bottle wine?
• Is Lou and Patty known each other?
• Sue does drink orange juice?
• Her parents are rich?
• Is this story is chronological in a order?
• Does Joan has a husband?
• Yesterday is Sue did drink two bottles of wine?

Eckman, Moravcsik, Wirth (1989)

• Example Wh-Qs:

• Why Sue didn’t look solution for her problem?
• Where Sue is living?
• Why did Sue stops drinking?
• Why is Patty’s going robbing the bank?
• What they are radicals?
• What Sue and Patty connection?
• Why she was angry?

Eckman et al. (1989) wh-inv wh-fronting? results

Eckman et al. (1989) YN-inv. wh-inv.? results

Eckman, Moravcsik, Wirth (1989)

Eckman’s Markedness Differential Hypothesis

• Markedness. A phenomenon or structure X in some language is relatively more marked than some other phenomenon or structure Y if cross-linguistically the presence of X in a language implies the presence of Y, but the presence of Y does not imply the presence of X.

• Duals imply plurals.
• Wh-inversion implies wh-fronting.
• Blue implies red.

Markedness Differential Hypothesis

• MDH: The areas of difficulty that a second language learner will have can be predicted on the basis of a comparison of the NL and TL such that:

• Those areas of the TL that are different from the NL and are relatively more marked than in the NL will be difficult;
• The degree of difficulty associated with those aspects of the TL that are different and more marked than in the NL corresponds to the relative degree of markedness associated with those aspects;
• Those areas of the TL that are different than the NL but are not relatively more marked than in the NL will not be difficult.

MDH example: Word-final segments

• Voiced obstruents most marked Surge

• Voiceless obstruents Coke

• Sonorant consonants Mountain

• Vowels least marked Coffee

• All Ls allow vowels word-finally—some only allow vowels. Some (e.g., Mandarin, Japanese) allow only vowels and sonorants. Some (e.g., Polish) allow vowels, sonorants, but only voiceless obstruents. English allows all four types.

Eckman (1981)

MDH example: Word-final segments

• Voiced obstruents most marked Surge

• Voiceless obstruents Coke

• Sonorant consonants Mountain

• Vowels least marked Coffee

• Idea: Mandarin has neither voiceless nor voiced obstruents in the L1—using a voiceless obstruent in place of a TL voiced obstruent is still not L1 compliant and is a big markedness jump. Adding a vowel is L1 compliant. Spanish has voiceless obstruents, to using a voiceless obstruent for a TL voiced obstruent is L1 compliant.

MDH and IL

• The MDH presupposes that the IL obeys the implicational universals too.

• Eckman et al. (1989) suggests that this is at least reasonable.

• The MDH suggests that there is a natural order of L2A along a markedness scale (stepping to the next level of markedness is easiest).

• Let’s consider what it means that an IL obeys implicational universals…

MDH and IL

• IL obeys implicational universals.

• That is, we know that IL is a language.

• So, we know that languages are such that having word-final voiceless obstruents implies that you also have word-final sonorant consonants, among other things.

• What would happen if we taught Japanese L2 learners of English only—and at the outset—voiced obstruents?

Generalizing with markedness scales

• Voiced obstruents most marked Surge

• Voiceless obstruents Coke

• Sonorant consonants Mountain

• Vowels least marked Coffee

• Japanese learner of English will have an easier time at each step learning voiceless obstruents and then voiced obstruents.

• But—if taught voiced obstruents immediately, the fact that the IL obeys implicational (markedness) universals means that voiceless obstruents “come for free.”

Nifty!

• Does it work? Does it help?

• Answers seem to be:

• Yes, it seems to at least sort of work.
• Maybe it helps.

• Learning a marked structure is harder. So, if you learn a marked structure, you can automatically generalize to the less marked structures, but was it faster than learning the easier steps in succession would have been?

Change from pre- to post-test Eckman, Bell, & Nelson (1988)

The Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy

• Keenan & Comrie (1977) observed a hierarchy among the kinds of relative clauses that languages allow.

• The astronaut [(that) I met yesterday].

• Head noun: astronaut

• Modifying clause: (that/who) I met — yesterday.

• Compare: I met the astronaut yesterday.

• This is an object relative because the place where the head noun would be in the simple sentence version is the object.

The Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy

• There are several kinds of relative clauses, based on where the head noun “comes from” in the modifying clause:

• The astronaut…

• [I met — yesterday] object
• [who — met me yesterday] subject
• [I gave a book to —] indirect object
• [I was talking about —] obj. of P
• [whose house I like —] Genitive (possessor)
• [I am braver than —] obj. of comparative

The Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy

• Turns out: Languages differ in what positions they allow relative clauses to be formed on.

• English allows all the positions mentioned to be used to make relative clauses.

• Arabic allows relative clauses to be formed only with subjects.

• Greek allows relative clauses to be formed only with subjects or objects.

Resumptive pronouns

• The guy who they don’t know whether he wants to come.

• A student who I can’t make any sense out of the papers he writes.

• The actress who Tom wondered whether her father was rich.

• In cases where relative clause formation is not allowed, it can sometimes be salvaged by means of a pronoun in the position that the head noun is to be associated with.

NPAH and resumptive pronouns

• Generally speaking, it turns out that in languages which do not allow relative clauses to be formed off a certain position, they will instead allow relative clauses with a resumptive pronoun in that position.

• Arabic: allows only subject relative clauses. But for all other positions allows a resumptive pronoun construction, analogous to:

• The book that John bought it.
• The tree that John is standing by it.
• The astronaut that John gave him a present.

NPAH

• The positions off which you can relativize appears to be an implicational hierarchy.

Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy

• More generally, there seems to be a hierarchy of “difficulty” (or “(in)accessibility”) in the types of relative clauses.

• A language which allows this…

• Subj > Obj > IO > OPrep > Poss > OComp

Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy

• More generally, there seems to be a hierarchy of “difficulty” (or “(in)accessibility”) in the types of relative clauses.

• A language which allows this…

• Will also allow these.

• Subj > Obj > IO > OPrep > Poss > OComp

Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy

• More generally, there seems to be a hierarchy of “difficulty” (or “(in)accessibility”) in the types of relative clauses.

• A language which allows this…

• Will also allow these. But not these…

• Subj > Obj > IO > OPrep > Poss > OComp

Relation to L2A?

• Suppose that KoL includes where the target language is on the NPAH.

• Do L2’ers learn the easy/unmarked/simple relative clauses before the others?

• Do L2’ers transfer the position of their L1 first?

• Does a L2’ers interlanguage grammar obey this typological generalization (if they can relativize a particular point on the NPAH, can they relativize everything higher too?)?

NPAH and L2A?

• Probably: The higher something is on the NPAH, the easier (faster) it is to learn.

• So, it might be easier to start by teaching subject relatives, then object, then indirect object, etc. At each step, the difficulty would be low.

• But, it might be more efficient to teach the (hard) object of a comparison—because if L2’ers interlanguage grammar includes whatever the NPAH describes, knowing that OCOMP is possible implies that everything (higher) on the NPAH is possible too. That is, they might know it without instruction. (Same issue as before with the phonology)

NPAH in L2A

• Very widely studied implicational universal in L2A—many people have addressed the question of whether the IL obeys the NPAH and whether teaching aa marked structure can help.

• Eckman et al. (1989) was about this second question…

Change from pre- to post-test Eckman, Bell, & Nelson (1988)

Doughty (1991)

• Investigating several issues at once:

• Effectiveness of type of instruction

• Meaning oriented
• Rule oriented

• Effectiveness of teaching “down the markedness hierarchy” (teaching a marked structure and allowing learner-internal generalization to an unmarked structure).

Doughty (1991)

• Subjects: 20 international students taking intensive ESL courses, without much prior knowledge of relative clauses. Average length of stay in the US was 3.7 months.

• Tasks:

• Grammaticality judgment
• Sentence completion

Doughty (1991)

• Subjects were pretested, then over two weeks (10 weekdays) they came in to a computer lab to take a “language lesson”. Then, immediately afterwards, subjects were posttested.

• In the language lessons, one of three possible things happened:

• Subject got the “meaning oriented treatment”
• Subject got the “rule oriented treatment”
• Subject got the “control treatment”

Doughty (1991)

• Daily lessons were a text of 5-6 sentences (of a two-week long “story”) containing an relative clause formed on the object of a preposition.

• This is the book that I was looking for.

• Recall: Noun phrase accessibility hierarchy:

• SU > DO > IO> OP > GEN > OCOMP

Procedure…

• Three steps:

• Skim
• Reading for understanding (experimental section)
• Scan

• Skim: Subjects saw the text for 30 seconds, with title, first sentence and last sentence highlighted—this is to “get the idea” of what the text is about.

Procedure…

• Reading for understanding: Each sentence displayed consecutively at the top of the screen. Three different possibilities:

• MOG: Also saw dictionary help (2m) and semantic explanations (referents, synonyms) (2m), including relationship between head noun and relative pronoun.
• ROG: Saw a little animated presentation of deriving a OPREP sentence from two sentences (This is the book, I was looking for the book, This is the book which I was looking for)
• COG: Saw each sentence, 2.5 minutes.

Procedure…

• Scan. Re-scan paragraph in order to be able to answer two questions about it, then write out a summary (NL).

Pretest

Posttest

Group mean gain scores

Results

• Both experimental groups showed strong positive effects (“Second Language Instruction Does Make a Difference”).

• The control group did too (simply from exposure) but not as dramatic.

• Both types of instruction appear to be equally effective with respect to gain in relativization ability.

• Comprehension-wise, MOG scored 70.01 vs. ROG’s 43.68 and CoG’s 40.64. Significant.

• Subjects improved basically following the NPAH by being taught just a marked position.

Comments

• Note that:

• ROG subjects improved in their ability to relativize, yet didn’t do so well on the comprehension tests—meaning isn’t utmost in getting the structural rules.
• MOG subjects got the structural properties even though not directly instructed in them (meaning didn’t get in the way).

What about markedness-based shortcuts?

• It looks like training them on OPREP successfully brought subjects to be able to relativize on everything higher (Subj., Dir. Obj., Indir. Obj.).

• But mysteriously, many people also seemed to get OCOMP by the post-test.

• Interlanguage grammars do seem to obey the typological requirements on languages (NPAH).

• Is genitive mis-analyzed in the NPAH typological work, given that it seems to be gotten early…?

Transfer, markedness, …

• Do (2002) looked at the NPAH going the other way, EnglishKorean.

• English: Relativizes on all 6 positions.
• Korean: Relativizes on 5 (not OCOMP)

• Found a very similar pattern to what we saw from Doughty’s experiment.

Transfer, markedness, …

• The original question Do was looking at was: Do English speakers transfer their position on the NPAH to the IL Korean?

• But look: If English allows all 6 positions, why do some of the learners only relativize down to DO, some to IO, some to OPREP?

• We haven’t even reached the question of transfer yet—it looks like they start over.

Subset principle?

• Null subject parameter

• Option (a): Null subjects are permitted.
• Option (b): Null subjects are not permitted.

• Italian = option a, English = option b.

Reminder: Subset Principle

• The idea is

• If one has only positive evidence, and
• If parameters are organized in terms of permissiveness,
• Then for a parameter setting to be learnable, the starting point needs to be the subset setting of the parameter.

• The Subset principle says that learners should start with the English setting of the null subject parameter and move to the Italian setting if evidence appears.

Reminder: Subset Principle

• The Subset Principle is basically that learners are conservative—they only assume a grammar sufficient to generate the sentences they hear, allowing positive evidence to serve to move them to a different parameter setting.

• Applied to L2: Given a choice, the L2’er assumes a grammatical option that generates a subset of the what the alternative generates.

• Does this describe L2A?

• Is this a useful sense of markedness?

Subset principle and markedness

• Based on the Subset principle, we’d expect the unmarked values (in a UG where languages are learnable) to be the ones which produce the “smallest” grammars.

• Given that in L1A we don’t seem to see any “misset” parameters, we have at least indirect evidence that the Subset principle is at work. Is there any evidence for it in L2A? Do these NPAH results constitute such evidence?

Subset vs. Transfer

• The Subset Principle, if it operating, would say that L2A starts with all of the defaults, the maximally conservative grammar.

• Another, mutually exclusive possibility (parameter by parameter, anyway) is that L2A starts with the L1 setting.

• This means that for certain pairs of L1 and L2, where the L1 has the marked (superset) value and L2 has the unmarked (subset) value, only negative evidence could move the L2’er to the right setting.

• Or, some mixture of the two in different areas.

NPAH and processing?

• At least a plausible alternative to the NPAH results following from the Subset Principle is just that relative clauses formed on positions lower in the hierarchy are harder to process. Consider:

• The astronaut…

• who [IP t met me yesterday] SUB
• who [IP I [VP met t yesterday]] DO
• who [IP I [VP gave a book [PP to t ]]] IO
• who [IP I was [VP talking [PP about t ]]] OPREP
• whose house [IP I [VP like [DP t ’s house]]] GEN
• who [IP I am [AP brave [degP -er [thanP than t ]]]] OCOMP

NPAH and processing?

• If it’s about processing, then the reason L2’ers progress through the “hierarchy” might be that initially they have limited processing room—they’re working too hard at the L2 to be able to process such deep extractions.

• Why are they working so hard?

• (Well, maybe L2A is like learning calculus?)

NPAH and processing?

• Is the NPAH itself simply a result of processing?

• The NPAH is a typological generalization about languages not about the course of acquisition.

• Does Arabic have a lower threshhold for processing difficulty than English? Doubtful.

• The NPAH may still be real, still be a markedness hierarchy based in something grammatical, but it turns out to be confounded by processing.

• So finding evidence of NPAH position transfer is very difficult.

Subset problems?

• One problem, though, is that many of the parameters of variation we think of today don’t seem to be really in a subset-superset relation. So there has to be something else going on in these cases anyway.

• VT
• Yes: √SVAO, *SAVO
• No: *SVAO, √SAVO
• Anaphor type
• Monomorphemic: √LD, *Non-subject
• Polymorphemic: *LD, √Non-subject

Mazurkewich (1984)

• John gave a book to Mary “unmarked”
• John gave Mary a book. “marked”
• To whom did John give a book? “unmarked”?
• Who did John give a book to? “marked”

• Assuming that the second of each pair is marked, Mazurkewich asked about timing of each in L2A.

• But although maybe more languages allow the first of each pair than the second, the pied-piping example should make us suspicious. Sounds kind of stilted for being the unmarked option…

Mazurkewich (1984)

• French-->English and Inuktitut-->English

• French lacks pied-piping and double-object constructions.

• Inuktitut is different enough that it is hard to find an analog to either the marked or unmarked constructions. (or so it is claimed)

• Did the L2’ers prefer the unmarked structures? Did they acquire them first?

Mazurkewich (1984)

• French-L1 beginners do appear to “prefer” the unmarked structures (2-to-1), and the marked structures gain ground as L2’ers become more advanced.

• But French lacks the marked structure; did they “start with the unmarked structure” or did they “start with the structure of their L1”?

• As for Inuktitut, they weakly “preferred” the unmarked structures (beginners 77% to 98%).

• Not very dramatic, not very convincing.

Mazurkewich (1984)

• Worse, on a different task (“question the italicized phrase”), although the French speakers showed a moderate preference for “unmarked” (pied-piping) structures, the Inuktitut speakers showed a preference for the marked structure.

• However, it could be that the whole experiment isn’t getting at what we want. The controls preferred the marked structure 3 or 4-to-1, so these “unmarked” structures seem to be marked from a language-internal perspective. Plus, this gives the learner a lot of evidence.

Problems so far

• If L1 has an “unmarked” value for something and L2 has a “marked” value, if the L2’er prefers (or, better, learns more quickly) the “unmarked” value, it could be either transfer or reverting to an unmarked value.

• The actual marked/unmarked set must be convincingly chosen—means nothing if we aren’t actually looking at marked/unmarked.

Best test would be…

• Find a convincing marked vs. unmarked pair, …

• Find an L2 which allows only the marked option, …

• Test speakers of an L1 which also only allows the marked option, …

• …and see if L2’ers use/accept the unmarked option early on.

Liceras (1985, 1986)

• Another potential marked/unmarked pair:

• Allows Ø comp. (marked; English)
• Disallows Ø comp. (unmarked; Spanish)

• EnglishSpanish

• Beginners: 49% acceptance of Ø comp.
• Intermediate: 25% acceptance.
• Advanced: 9% acceptance.

• Looks like transfer (not initial unmarkedness) (contra Liceras’ hypothesis)

Schwartz (1993)

• Back to the questions:

• How is a L2 acquired?
• Is L2 knowledge like native knowledge?
• Supposing it is, then knowing the rules isn’t really part of knowing the language.

• Of course, you can learn the rules and consciously follow them. But is that knowing English?

• Prepositions are things you don’t end a sentence with.
• Strive to not split your infinitives.
• Don’t be so immodest as to say I and John left; say John and I left instead.
• Impact is not a verb.

Schwartz (1993)

• Schwartz distinguishes two kinds of knowledge:

• Learned linguistic knowledge

• I want to definitely avoid splitting my infinitives.

• Competence

• *Who did John laugh after asking whether I spread the rumor that bought the coffee?

L1A

• UG (the range of possible languages/grammars)

• LAD (a system for getting from the data to the particular parameter setting for the target language—not a conscious process, nor available to conscious introspection)

• PLD (positive input)

• Would it help the LAD to get rules explicitly? (“Use do to avoid stranding tense in Infl”; “Don’t extract an embedded subject out from under an overt complementizer”; “You want the other spoon.”)

L2A

• If L1AD can’t really use this information, why would we necessarily think that the rules we learn in French class are in the right form to “be absorbed” by the L2AD, if such a thing exists…?

• That is: L2 has things about it which can only be learned with the help of negative evidence (or an L2AD). Yet this doesn’t guarantee that negative evidence will help.

How can we tell the difference between LLK and competence?

• (Well-formulated) parameters have wide-ranging effects. For example, verb raising:

• *X: F question can’t use do-support.
• Y: F adverbs ok between V and Obj.

• Train subjects on *X. If they reset the parameter, a) they should “automatically” know Y as well, and b) they can use negative evidence.

Schwartz’s model

So why does it seem to be useful to be taught the rules?

• Perhaps—knowing the rules (though it is LLK) allows you in a way to generate your own PLD. It’s that PLD, the output of using the rules, which the “L2AD” can make use of when constructing KoL.

• This might explain the apparent truth that practicing helps a lot more than just memorizing the rules…?

Krashen’s “Monitor Model”

• An early and influential model of second language acquisition was the “Monitor Model”, based on five basic hypotheses:

• The Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis
• The Monitor Hypothesis
• The Natural Order Hypothesis
• The Input Hypothesis
• The Affective Filter Hypothesis

The Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis

• Acquisition and Learning are different.

• Acquisition refers to the (subconscious) internalizing of implicit rules, the result of meaningful naturalistic interaction using the language.

• Learning refers to the conscious process that results in knowing about the language, e.g., the result of classroom experience with explicit rules. (LLK)

• That is, you can learn without acquiring (or acquire without learning).

• Krashen hypothesizes that learned and acquired rules are stored differently; one cannot eventually be converted into the other; they are simply different.

• Perhaps, or maybe the speculation on the previous slide was right.

The Natural Order Hypothesis

• Acquisition proceeds in a “natural order” (i.e. the order of morpheme acquisition discussed earlier).

• This says nothing about learning, only acquisition.

• Also: Krashen’s actual hypothesis is based on post-hoc analysis of the order L2’er do seem to acquire these morphemes—there’s no underlying theoretical machinery. That’s not to say that there couldn’t be some, of course.

The Monitor Hypothesis

• A linguistic expression originates in the system of acquired knowledge, but prior to output a “Monitor” checks it against consciously known rules and may modify the expression before it is uttered.

The Monitor Hypothesis

• For the Monitor to work, you need to

• Be able to focus on the form (time, attention)
• Know the rule

• So, under pressure (e.g., time pressure), the Monitor may not be operating…

The Monitor Hypothesis

• The Monitor would probably be the place where things like “don’t split infinitives” and “don’t end a sentence with a preposition” live as well.

The Input Hypothesis

• The Input Hypothesis draws on the Natural Order Hypothesis; the idea is that there is a natural order of acquisition, but in order to advance from one step to the next, a learner needs to get comprehensible input, input which provides evidence for the stage one level past the learners’ current level. The idea is that only this level of input is useful for the advancement of acquisition.

The Input Hypothesis

• Krashen’s view on acquisition: Speaking does not cause acquisition, it is the result of acquisition, having built competence on the basis of comprehensible input.

• If input is at the right level and comes in sufficient quantity, the necessary grammar is automatically acquired.

• The language teacher’s main role, then, is to provide adequate amounts of comprehensible input for the language learners.

• Let’s stick to the model and not the politics here…

Input ≠ intake

• Inuktitut—input:

• Qasuiirsarvigssarsingitluinarnarpuq

• ‘Someone did not find a completely suitable resting place.’

• tired cause.be suitable not someone Qasu-iir-sar-vig-ssar-si-ngit-luinar-nar-puq not place.for find completely 3sg

Input ≠ intake

• After three long nights of gripning, John finally found his slipwoggle.

• Knowing so much about the rest of the sentence can tell us quite a bit about the parts we don’t know yet. (Slipwoggle is a noun, a possessible thing; to gripen(?) is a verb, a process that one can perform over an extended period of time). We can then make use of this to build our language knowledge (here, vocabulary).

Input ≠ intake

• (Krashen) Learner must get comprehensible input (mixture of structures acquired and structures not yet acquired) to advance.

• Input: What is available to the learner.

• Intake: Input that is used in grammar-building.

What makes input into intake?

• Apperception: Recognizing the gap between what L2’er knows and what there is to know.

• Comprehensibility: Either the semantic meaning is determinable or the relevant structural aspects are determinable.

• Attention: Selecting aspects of the knowledge to be learned (from among many other possible things) for processing.

• Output: Forcing a structural hypothesis, elsewhere used to shape input into a form useful for intake.

Input  apperception

• Some input is apperceived, some isn’t.

• That which isn’t is thought of as blocked by various “filters”:

• Time pressure
• Frequency non-extremes
• Affective (status, motivation, attitude, …)
• Prior knowledge (grounding, analyzability)
• Salience (drawing attention)

The Affective Filter Hypothesis

• Another aspect of the need for comprehensible input is that it must be “let in” by the learner. Various “affective” factors like motivation, anxiety, can “block” input and keep it from effectively producing acquisition.

The overall model

• Although Krashen’s “Monitor Model” suffers from a lack of specific testable details, it has had a significant impact on L2A research, and has an intuitive appeal.

An interesting idea (courtesy of Carol Neidle)

• If you were to learn French, you would be taught conjugations of regular and irregular verbs. Regular -er verbs have a pattern that looks like this:

• Infinitive: donner ‘give’
• 1sg je donne 1pl nous donnons
• 2sg tu donnes 2pl vous donnez
• 3sg il donne 3pl ils donnent

Some French “irregulars”

• Infinitive: donner ‘give’
• 1sg je donne 1pl nous donnons
• 2sg tu donnes 2pl vous donnez
• 3sg il donne 3pl ils donnent

• Another class of verbs including acheter ‘buy’ is classified as irregular, because the vowel quality changes through the paradigm.

• Infinitive: ceder ‘yield’
• 1sg je cède 1pl nous cédons
• 2sg tu cèdes 2pl vous cédez
• 3sg il cède 3pl ils cèdent

Some French “irregulars”

• Infinitive: donner ‘give’
• 1sg je donne 1pl nous donnons
• 2sg tu donnes 2pl vous donnez
• 3sg il donne 3pl ils donnent

• The way it’s usually taught, you just have to memorize that in the nous and vous form you have “é” and in the others you have “è”.

• Infinitive: ceder ‘yield’
• 1sg je cète 1pl nous cédons
• 2sg tu cètes 2pl vous cédez
• 3sg il cète 3pl ils cèdent

Some French “irregulars”

• However, the pattern makes perfect phonological sense in French—if you have a closed syllable (CVC), you get è, otherwise you get é.

• [sd] (cède) [se.de] (cédez)

• So why is this considered irregular?

• Because in English, you think of the sounds in cédez as [sed.de], due to the rules of English phonology.

• Infinitive: ceder ‘yield’
• 1sg je cède 1pl nous cédons
• 2sg tu cèdes 2pl vous cédez
• 3sg il cède 3pl ils cèdent

Some French “irregulars”

• Because in English, you think of the sounds in cédez as [sed.de], due to the rules of English phonology.

• Since in all of these cases, English phonology would have closed syllables, there’s no generalization to be drawn—sometimes closed syllables have é and sometimes they have è.

• What could we do?

• Infinitive: ceder ‘yield’
• 1sg je cède [sed] 1pl nous cédons [sed.dõ]
• 2sg tu cèdes [sed] 2pl vous cédez [sed.de]
• 3sg il cède [sed] 3pl ils cèdent [sed]

Some French “irregulars”

• If people are really “built for language” and are able to pick up language implicitly (as seems to be the case from everything we’ve been looking at), then if people are provided with the right linguistic data, they will more or less automatically learn the generalization.

• Problem is: The English filter on the French data is obscuring the pattern, and hiding the generalization.

• Infinitive: ceder ‘yield’
• 1sg je cède [sed] 1pl nous cédons [sed.dõ]
• 2sg tu cèdes [sed] 2pl vous cédez [sed.de]
• 3sg il cède [sed] 3pl ils cèdent [sed]

Some French “irregulars”

• Something to try: Provide people with the right data, see if they pick up the pronunciation. Perhaps: exaggerate syllabification. (attention) Perhaps try to instill this aspect of the phonology first.

• Et voilà. Perhaps this will make these “irregulars” as easy to learn as regulars!

• The downside: I have no idea if this would actually work.
• Infinitive: ceder ‘yield’
• 1sg je cède “sed” 1pl nous cédons “se—dõ”
• 2sg tu cèdes “sed” 2pl vous cédez “se—de”
• 3sg il cède “sed” 3pl ils cèdent “sed”

“Incomprehensible input”

• So this is another way in which input might be “incomprehensible”—not that it is inherently incomprehensible (i.e. not that it would be incomprehensible to a L1’er), but that the prism of the L1 is getting in the way of seeing the data for what it really is.

Some critiques on record re: the Monitor Model

• Are acquired and learned rules really stored so separately that they cannot interact? Gass & Selinker’s textbook points out that “it is counterintuitive to hypothesize that nothing learned in a formal situation can be a candidate for [fluent, unconscious speech]”.

• But this doesn’t seem to be a very persuasive objection—First, counterintuitiveness is not an argument. Second, even if formal, learned rules are stored completely separately, nothing prevents the use of these rules in production from providing input to the acquisition system, providing an indirect “conversion” of knowledge.

Some critiques on record re: the Monitor Model

• G&S also observe (attributing the objection to Gregg) that in Krashen’s model, the Monitor only affects output (speech, writing), but anecdotal evidence for use of formally learned rules in decoding heard utterances is easy to come by.

• Perhaps this is true of Krashen’s particular statement, but there seems to be no need to toss out all aspects of his hypotheses based on an oversight of this sort—it seems easily repairable by extending the model to allow learned competence to also monitor input and provide input to the acquired competence.

• Of course, Krashen may have meant it, but that’s irrelevant. He’s one guy with good ideas and bad ideas like anyone.

Some critiques on record re: the Monitor Model

• Most of the objections to the Monitor Model focus on the impreciseness of the hypotheses; although Krashen may not have treated them this way, they clearly must be used only as a starting point, a way to think about the process of L2A.

• Further research in this direction needs to be focused on trying to refine the existing “hypotheses” to yield testable (falsifiable) hypotheses with a higher degree of specificity.

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