Input and Evidence: The Raw Material of Second Language Acquisition (Language Acquisition & Language Disorders)

INPUT AND EVIDENCE

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION & LANGUAGE DISORDERS

EDITORS Harald Clahsen University of Essex

Lydia White McGill University

EDITORIAL BOARD Melissa Bowerman (Max Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen) Wolfgang Dressler (University of Vienna) Katherine Demuth (Brown University) Nina Hyams (University of California at Los Angeles) William O’Grady (University of Hawaii) Jürgen Meisel (Universität Hamburg) Mabel Rice (University of Kansas) Luigi Rizzi (University of Siena) Bonnie Schwartz (University of Durham) Antonella Sorace (University of Edinburgh) Karin Stromswold (Rutgers University) Jürgen Weissenborn (Universität Potsdam) Frank Wijnen (Utrecht University)

Volume 25

Susanne E. Carroll Input and Evidence The raw material of second language acquisition

INPUT AND EVIDENCE THE RAW MATERIAL OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

SUSANNE E. CARROLL Universität Potsdam

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carroll, Susanne. Input and evidence : the raw material of second language acquisition / Susanne E. Carroll. p. cm. -- (Language acquisition & language disorders : ISSN 0925-0123; v. 25) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Second language acquisition. 2. Linguistic models. I. Title. II. Series. P118.2.C374 2000 401’.93--dc21 00-046767 ISBN 90 272 2493 5 (Eur.) / 1 58811 011 7 (US) (alk. paper) CIP © 2001 - John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 36224 • 1020 ME Amsterdam • The Netherlands John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 • USA

To my Dad, J. Allan Carroll. Just for you.

Table of contents

List of tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii List of figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii C 1 Questions, problems, and definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Objectives and research questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Objectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Research questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Definitions: stimuli, intake, and input . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Stimuli and transducers: the first level of processing . . . . . . . 2.2 Modularity and the Comprehensible Input Hypothesis . . . . . . 2.3 Processing in the Autonomous Induction Theory . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Positive and negative evidence, positive and negative feedback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Competence and performance, skill and control, faculties, and abilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. A reformulation of the research questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C 2 Property and transition theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Why do we need the Autonomous Induction Theory (or something like it)? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 What must an SLA theory explain? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Problems with SLA applications of Principles and Parameters Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Problems with the Competition Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 1 1 4 8 8 12 16 17 24 31 31

37 37 37 40 48

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.4 A third approach: the Autonomous Induction Theory . . . . . . 50 1.5 The limits of theism and deism as accounts of SLA . . . . . . . 51 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

C 3 The representational and developmental problems of language acquisition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Principles and parameters theory (P&P) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 P&P theory: the core ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Universal Grammar: substantive universals . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Universal Grammar: formal universals . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Well, that looks good! So what’s the problem? . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 UG and the problem of representational realism . . . . . . 3.2 Can parameters be biological constructs? . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 The SLA P&P theory has no model of triggers . . . . . . 3.4 How does one set a parameter in the face of ambiguous stimuli from two different languages? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 The deductive value of parameters is now questionable . 3.6 What if there were no parameters in a theory of UG? . . 3.7 What might it mean now to say that UG is “innate”? . . 4. Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C 4 The autonomous induction model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. The language faculty in outline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Representational Modularity: The hypothesis of levels 2.2 The intermediate level theory of awareness . . . . . . . 3. Induction and i-learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Basic properties of induction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Induction as a search through a search space? . . . . . 3.3 Domains of knowledge as mental models . . . . . . . . 3.4 Condition–action rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Competition among rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6 Clustering of effects? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.7 Generation of new rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.8 What initiates and ends i-learning? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Summary of the Autonomous Induction Theory . . . . . . . . .

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119 119 120 121 127 130 130 131 136 141 151 155 164 168 173

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C 5 Constraints on i-learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Form extraction, distributional analysis, and categorisation . . . . . . . 1.1 Prosodic bootstrapping and form extraction? . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Distributional analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Categorisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Removing the straw man, or why induction needn’t produce “rogue grammars” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Induction and the Autonomy Hypotheses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Induction is not random hypothesis-formation . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Jettisoning the problem-solving metaphor . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 The Coding Constraint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 The role of feedback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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C 6 The logical problem of (second) language acquisition revisited . . . 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. There is no logical problem of second language acquisition . . . 2.1 The form of the argument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 What is the logical problem of language acquisition? . . 2.2.1 Three basic assumptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.2 The linguistically innocent learner . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.3 The cognitively innocent learner . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.4 The Poverty of the Stimulus Hypothesis . . . . . . . 2.2.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. The empirical facts from first language acquisition . . . . . . . . . 3.1 From FLA to SLA? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Input consists of more than strings of forms . . . . . . . . . 3.2.1 Meaning as input . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.2 Feedback as input . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.3 The Simplified Input Hypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 The representational problem vs. the discovery problem 3.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. The empirical problem of second language acquisition . . . . . . 4.1 Preliminaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 The Success Measure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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207 207 208 208 210 210 213 215 222 226 227 227 228 228 230 233 236 238 239 239 239

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4.3

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The adult’s other cognitive “equipment” . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.1 How meaning solves the logical problem of language acquisition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.2 How feedback solves the logical problem of language acquisition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.3 The time element . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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C 7 Input and the Modularity Hypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. The Modularity of Mind Hypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Componentiality, autonomy and domain-specificity . . . . . . . . 2.2 Modules are part of the “hardware” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Modular domains exhibit a specific ontogeny . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 The automaticity and speed of modular processing . . . . . . . . 2.5 Modules produce “shallow” outputs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6 “Cross-talk” is limited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.7 The Schwartz model of modular L2 acquisition . . . . . . . . . . 2.7.1 K-acquisition vs. k-learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.7.2 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. What’s wrong with Fodorian modularity? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Problem one: We’re not talking about “language acquisition”, we’re talking only about “grammar acquisition” . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Problem two: Fodor’s concept of what a module is is too crude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Problem three: The relationship between parsing and knowledge in proficient native speakers and acquisition in L2 learners is unclear . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Problem four: It cannot be true that all grammatical restructuring takes place as a direct consequence of a failure to process input bottom-up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Whither Linguistic Competence? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 What does a psychogrammar really consist of? . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.1 Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.2 Meaning and form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5. Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

249 249 250 251 252 252 254 255 255 255 255 259 260 261 262

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C 8 The evidence for negative evidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. The empirical studies of indirect negative evidence, metalinguistic instruction, and feedback and correction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Indirect negative evidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 The metalinguistic instruction studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 The feedback and correction studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. The -ing affixation/morphological conversion study . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 The subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Design and methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Predictions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Major findings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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290 290 294 313 321 321 322 329 329 337 340

C 9 Feedback in the Autonomous Induction Theory . . . . . . . . 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Focused attention and detectable errors . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Focused attention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Detectable errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Error location, or the blame assignment problem. 2.4 Categorisation, i-learning, and feedback . . . . . . . 3. Learning the double object construction . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 The metalinguistic feedback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 The other forms of negative evidence . . . . . . . . 4. Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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C 10 The interpretation of verbal feedback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. How could feedback and correction initiate restructuring in the learner’s grammar? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Feedback and correction are types of speech acts . . . . . . . 2.2 To count as feedback an utterance must be parsed and interpreted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Irrelevance of linguistic feedback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 The Relevance of feedback depends on its informativeness

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2.5 2.6

3.

The blame assignment problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Metalinguistic information, grammar teaching, and information which cannot be modelled . . . . . . . . . . . 2.7 The corrective intention and indirect forms of feedback Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 393 Appendix 1: Acceptability judgement task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395 Appendix 2: Experimental session . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 401 Subject index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 449

List of tables

Chapter 6 Table 6.1: Complexity of language input (reconstructed from Morgan 1989: 352) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 8 Table 8.1: Means and standard deviations by group and session for the feedback items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Table 8.2: Results of repeated measures ANOVAS for the feedback items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Table 8.3: Between-group comparison of means of feedback items on the initial feedback session . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Table 8.4: Between-group comparison of means of feedback items on Test 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Table 8.5: Between-group comparison of means of feedback items on Test 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Table 8.6: Means and standard deviations by group and session for the guessing items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Table 8.7: Results of repeated measures ANOVAS for the guessing items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Table 8.8: Between-group comparison of means of guessing items on the initial guessing session . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Table 8.9: Between-group comparison of means of guessing items on Test 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Table 8.10: Between-group comparison of means of guessing items on Test 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Table 8.11: Between-group comparison of means of guessing items on initial guessing session (from Carroll and Swain 1993) . . . . . . . . Table 8.12: Between-group comparison of means of guessing items on Test 1 (from Carroll and Swain 1993) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Table 8.13: Between-group comparison of means of guessing items on Test 2 (from Carroll and Swain 1993) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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List of figures

Chapter 1 Figure 1.1: Transducing linguistic stimuli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Figure 1.2: The relationship of stimuli to input . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Figure 1.3: A modular processing/learning model à la Schwartz (1993: 157) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Figure 1.4: The Comprehensible Input Hypothesis (Faerch et al. 1984: 187) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Figure 1.5: Types of possible inputs during speech processing . . . . Figure 1.6: Positive and negative evidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 4 Figure 4.1: The organisation of all levels of mental representation (Jackendoff 1987: 248) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Figure 4.2: The organisation of the grammar (Jackendoff 1997: 100) Figure 4.3: Processing Hypothesis for perception (Jackendoff 1987: 101) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Figure 4.4: Processing Hypothesis for production (Jackendoff 1987: 109) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Figure 4.5: Problem-solving as the transition from an initial “problem state” to a “goal state” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Figure 4.6: Problem-solving as the transition from an “initial state” to an “intermediate state” and to an “end state” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 7 Figure 7.1: Fodor’s model of faculty psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . Figure 7.2: Schwartz’ model of modular processing . . . . . . . . . . . Figure 7.3: Interactive parallel processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Figure 7.4: Frazier’s modularity (Frazier 1990: 413) . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter 8 Figure 8.1: A model of Lexical Phonology showing the interaction of word-building processes and phonological rules (based on Jensen 1990: 92) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 Figure 8.2: % Correct — Feedback items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330 Figure 8.3: % Correct — Guessing items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333

Acknowledgements

The origins of this book go back to the mid 1980s and my increasing dissatisfaction with the turn which generative work in second language acquisition was then taking. I decided to do something completely different. In the intervening years, I have instead been pursuing an agenda focused more on the integration of linguistic theorising with research on processing, perception, memory, and other aspects of cognition. My intellectual debt to Ray Jackendoff will be apparent from the first pages of this book. If Ray ever chooses to read it, I can only hope that he is pleased with the use I have made of his many ideas about linguistic cognition and meaning. Bonnie Schwartz and I have been discussing the specific themes treated here for years — over e-mail, at conferences, over the telephone. We don’t agree on the details but the discussions have always been stimulating and I expect them to continue to be. Merrill Swain was co-principal investigator of the project which led to the data set reported on in Chapter 8. This project was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC File no. 410–89–1484) and the Ontario Ministry of Education through its block grant to the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. I would like to acknowledge the generosity of both of these funding agencies. I take pleasure also in acknowledging the assistance of Myriam Schachter, who carried out the experimental sessions with the subjects, Phil Nagy, who provided statistical advice, and Harmut Brasche who carried out the statistical analysis. I am grateful for this collaboration; I learned a great deal from it. Mike Sharwood-Smith read parts of the manuscript and made many important editorial suggestions. Kevin Gregg read two (only two?) complete drafts, commenting on everything from my interpretations of Chomsky to my spelling. The final version is vastly improved due to his pointed criticisms and suggestions. (And I still owe him a dinner!) Olaf Malecki proof-read the penultimate text and assisted with the bibliography and indices. Lydia White and Harald Clahsen are to be thanked for facilitating things at Benjamins. Kees Vaes of Benjamins was understanding about interminable delays in the delivery of the

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manuscript (due to the use of three different versions of Word on three different computers in three different locations). I thank Cambridge University Press for permission to reproduce Figure 1.3 (also 7.2) taken from B. D. Schwartz “On explicit and negative data effecting and affecting competence and linguistic behavior” Studies in Second Language Acquisition 15(2): 157, Table 6.1, taken from J. Morgan “Learnability considerations and the nature of trigger experience in language acquisition” Behavioral and Brain Science 12(2): 352, and Tables 8.11, 8.12, and 8.13, taken from S. Carroll and M. Swain “Explicit and implicit negative feedback: An empirical study of the learning of linguistic generalizations” Studies in Second Language Acquisition 15(2); John Benjamin’s for permission to reproduce Figure 8.1, taken from John Jensen’s Morphology: Word structures in generative grammar; and MIT Press for permission to reproduce Figures 4.1, 4.3, and 4.4, which are all from R. Jackendoff’s Consciousness and the computational mind. Gyldendal were repeatedly approached for permission to reproduce Figure 1.4 from Learner Language and Language Learning (1984: 187), models of speech processing: Psycholinguistic and computational perspectives. If I have not lost sight completely of the many changes which have occurred within linguistic theory during my period of psychological reeducation, it is due to the members of the Linguistics Department of the Universität Potsdam. My colleagues Ria de Bleser, Damar Cavar, Gisbert Fanselow, Caroline Féry, Hans-Martin Gärtner, Ina Hockl, Barbara Höhle, Inge Lasser, Susan Powers, Doug Saddy, Matthias Schlesewsky, Peter Staudacher, and Jürgen Weissenborn, have created a particularly stimulating work environment for someone like me. It is hard to imagine a more interesting place to be if you’re interested in linguistic and psycholinguistic issues. If the relationship has at times seemed one-sided (all take and no give) I can only plead that the UP occasionally provides too many distractions. Ria de Bleser, Reinhold Kliegl, and Susan Powers have done me a thousand kindnesses in various ways at various times. The Parkes (John, Alexandra, Dennis, and Jessica), Diane Massam, Yves Roberge, Susan Ehrlich, Nancy McNee, Lynn Drapeau and Michael Rochemont have provided much e-humour and e-support over the years. To my two best friends Margaret McNee and Chantal Ramsay I owe many thanks for their generosity, affection, and ability to put everything into perspective when I can’t. Finally, I would like to thank my husband Jürgen M. Meisel for his encouragement. We have discussed aspects of this work over the years, and I have made extensive use of his ideas and his research. But JMM had a more important role to play in the genesis of this work. At some point, all discussions ended with: “Finish your book!” And so I did.

C 1 Questions, problems, and definitions

1.

Objectives and research questions

1.1 Objectives This book has several objectives. One is to explore the logical relationship between the language that second language learners hear and interpret and the nature of the knowledge of a second language (L2) that they ultimately acquire. A second objective is to investigate the particular role that feedback and correction might play in principle in second language acquisition (SLA). A third is to investigate these issues against the backdrop of research on Universal Grammar (UG), seen as an attempt to constrain language learning theory to what is logically possible and empirically observable. Fourthly, I wish to locate input and evidence within a particular metatheoretical space by embedding discussion of learning within a theory of speech processing and speech production. Fifthly, I intend to add to the body of empirical evidence which supports the hypothesis that feedback and correction have a role to play in initiating second language acquisition and determining the nature of its course, although I will also show that this role is much more limited than many might at present think. Finally, I hope to draw attention to one of the most under-researched and under-theorised aspects of second language acquisition — the raw material from which learners learn — and to argue that it deserves far more attention than it currently gets. (1.1) Objectives of this book a. to explore the logical relationship between the language second language learners are exposed to (input) and the linguistic competence and skills they ultimately acquire; b. to explore the function of feedback and correction in SLA; c. to fit input, feedback and correction into a constrained theory of second language acquisition;

2

INPUT AND EVIDENCE

d. e.

f.

to embed models of second language acquisition in a theory of speech perception and speech production; to add to the empirical evidence which shows that feedback and correction play a causal role in SLA, but to also show that this role is limited to specific kinds of language acquisition problems and to particular periods of development; to demonstrate that feedback and correction cannot be major explanatory mechanisms in a general theory of language acquisition.

My motivation is quite simple. Although SLA researchers agree about very little when it comes to explaining the how and why of L2 acquisition, one point on which there is consensus is that SLA requires exposure to the second language. If you want to learn Ojibwa, you will have to listen to Ojibwa speech, read Ojibwa texts, and attempt to reproduce Ojibwa sentences. This much would seem to be a matter of logical necessity, since there is as yet no Ojibwa pill on the market obviating the need for language learning, nor are there any reported cases of anyone coming to know Ojibwa through telepathy. Learners still have to work at learning, and learning requires exposure to the sounds or written forms of the L2. From these sounds and written symbols, learners must construct grammatical representations of the speech they are hearing or reading and infer a meaning. This said, consensus ends, for there is no agreement on what kind or how much exposure a learner needs.1 Indeed, we know very little still about the kinds of linguistic exposure learners actually get. Are they bathed in the sounds of the L2 in a way which makes the words and structures expressing particular meanings transparent? Or do they spend their days immersed in their own thoughts against a background rumble of noises which make no sense to them, and emerge only occasionally to participate in speech exchanges mostly involving highly ritualised language? On the basis of what we currently know, we could argue for either scenario. We also do not know how learners process the sounds they hear although processing speech is a necessary first step in constructing grammatical representations. Do all learners experience the L2 initially as a “wall of noise” whose sounds cannot even be perceived as syllables? Certainly, this is the initial experience of many learners. Or do learners of particular L1s learning particular L2s already come equipped with the knowledge necessary to re-analyse the continuous speech signal into discrete strings of sound units? Extensive search of the SLA literature has failed to produce any studies shedding light on this particular question. Much of the early SLA literature discusses learning in general terms and presupposes that learners already have the ability to perceive and extract “words” from the speech signal. Such discussions can shed no light on the initial state or on how the learner leaves it. Even if we limit our attention to learners at a subsequent stage of

QUESTIONS, PROBLEMS, AND DEFINITIONS

3

learning, still we do not know a whole lot about how they construct grammatical representations once they do perceive and encode “words”, although we have made some progress in the investigation of both global properties of interlanguage grammars and the specific details of a limited range of learning problems such as inflectional morphology, constituent order, reflexives, stress, syllable structure constraints, and the learning of phonetic segments. It is often suggested that learners discover form through meaning. But we know little about how learners make sense of the sounds they hear in context, that is to say, how they map meanings onto sounds. It is often implied that meanings are transparent whenever speech is used in context but observation of real language use suggests that many situations lend themselves to a number of mutually inconsistent interpretations. If meaning is to provide the way into grammatical form, we will require a sophisticated theory of meaning, appropriate for different groups of learners. In its absence, we must admit that we have no theory of input for SLA. A theory of input to learning is required for all sorts of reasons. We need it, first of all, to make sense of learnability research. Learnability studies ask how it is possible in principle to learn a language. One criterion is that learners get input, but no one has, as yet, explored the minimally necessary kinds of input needed to learn a single grammatical phenomenon. This is partly due to the complexity of even “simple” grammatical phenomena, partly due to the changing nature of grammarians’ views of how to define them. If we are to state how learners identify formal entities like “word”, “sentence”, or “passive construction” in the speech stream, then we will obviously need clear and unambiguous formal definitions of what they are. Secondly, it is not clear yet how to marry the idealisations of learnability theories to the psycholinguistic assumptions designed to characterise real learning in real time. Consequently, the claim that learners can learn on the basis of a single exposure to a given phenomenon is currently just as viable as the contrary claim that they need several hundred hours of exposure, correction, and practice. Indeed, there is not even agreement as to whether it really makes sense to claim that learners learn a language from exposure to the sounds of the L2. If second language acquisition is constrained by an innate languagespecific knowledge system called Universal Grammar, as many have maintained, and if by the word learning we mean hypothesis-formation and hypothesis-testing of the sort evidenced in problem-solving and concept learning, as Schachter (1992) has argued, then it would be misleading, say some researchers, to describe with this word what language learners do.2 Krashen (1981) has attempted to draw a distinction between acquisition (defined as the unconscious processes of infants and children, whatever they might be) and learning (the conscious processes involving metalinguistic information in the form of grammar rules of the sort

4

INPUT AND EVIDENCE

fostered in many language classrooms). Krashen argued that learners acquire from exposure to the sounds of the L2 in meaningful communication, but this is not learning. While Krashen has provided no direct empirical evidence for the distinction, many now assume that it is correct.3 To summarise, the most basic questions about the relationship between grammar learning in SLA and the speech or meanings on which it is based have yet to be sorted out. In this book I shall ask some of these basic questions, and I hope to provide some equally basic answers. 1.2 Research questions In pursuing my objectives, I will explore in detail four particular questions. The first is: Question 1 What is the nature of the raw material on which particular grammatical generalisations are formed?

In contrast to what appears to be the standard position in our field (see Carroll 1999b, for a defense of this claim), I will argue here that the input to language learning cannot consist of the objective properties of the speech signal or the physical properties of the page of a book. Language learning requires the transformation of wave forms or patterns of light detected by the eye into mental representations of a particular sort. Only these mental representations can be the starting point for language learning. Exploring how the wave form (or the patterns of light) is converted into mental representations ties a theory of language learning irrevocably to research on speech processing.4 Unfortunately, contemporary research on speech processing has had little influence on main stream SLA theorising which has contented itself largely with the investigation of ideas emanating from grammatical theory, in particular, Principles and Parameters Theory, and from first language acquisition research done within the same paradigm.5 While individual efforts can undoubtedly be cited, for example, Myles’ (1995) treatment of working memory in the parsing and acquisition of whconstructions in French by English speakers, the on-going research in various centres in Europe (especially in The Netherlands) on the L2 and bilingual lexicon (see, e.g., de Groot and Nas 1991; de Bot, Cox, Ralston, Schaufeli and Weltens 1995; Pal 1999, 2000), Juffs’ (1998a, b) studies of sentence-based parsing in a principle-based parsing framework (see also Juffs and Harrington 1995, 1996), or Pienemann’s use of production models in his Processability Theory (Pienemann 1998a, b), such efforts have tended to be narrow in focus. Certainly they have had little influence on the way in which SLA tends to be conceptualised in the

QUESTIONS, PROBLEMS, AND DEFINITIONS

5

textbooks we use to train our students. I hope this book may help to change this state of affairs. The second question to be asked is: Question 2 What is the role that conceptual information plays in the learning of grammatical distinctions?

In contrast to some generative SLA research to be discussed later in detail, I shall argue that input to learning cannot consist solely of information entering the linguistic systems “bottom-up” from the sensory systems. Some grammatical learning requires linkages between concepts and morphosyntactic representations; some grammatical learning requires linkages between concepts and phonological representations. Both possibilities presuppose that conceptual distinctions are accessible to and accessed by learning mechanisms constructing novel grammatical categories or novel grammatical structures. At the same time, I hope to show that learning mechanisms make constrained use of conceptual information. This entails that learning mechanisms must make use of grammatical features, categories and structures of an autonomous sort. Grammatical categories are not mere convenient labels for conceptual categories, thus allowing us to dispense with all that formal nonsense so beloved of grammarians! Nor can the constraints which hold of interlanguage grammars be derived from conceptual functions. Consequently, a theory of SLA must show how grammatical categories and structures can be acquired given appropriate input. My view is that that input (including input of a conceptual type) must be defined in formal terms if it is to account for grammatical knowledge. The third question to be examined has to do with the role of feedback and correction in adult SLA as a motor of grammatical restructuring. Question 3 What is the role of feedback and correction in adult second language acquisition?

It is a major thesis of this book that correction and feedback play a role in the creation of novel forms of grammatical knowledge. I intend to demonstrate that for correction and feedback to play a role in grammatical restructuring, what is said to the learner must receive a metalinguistic interpretation. In other words, she must understand that someone is talking about her speech, which in turn demands that she form a conceptual representation of her own utterance. The deployment of correction and feedback thus operates initially from within the conceptual system of the learner, where what has been said is interpreted and integrated into

6

INPUT AND EVIDENCE

a model of the on-going speech situation. This logically entails that meaning must be able to influence grammatical restructuring. Talk of meaning requires us to have a theory of meaning. This work will make extensive use of two distinct approaches to that subject. On the one hand, I will adopt Jackendoff’s theory of Conceptual Semantics, which is especially congenial to psycholinguistic argumentation and data, in contrast to much of the truth-theoretic formal semantics developed within the philosophy of language and pursued within linguistic theory.6 Nonetheless, it must be admitted that Jackendoff’s theory is one which attempts to describe and explain in principle how linguistic expressions can have the meanings they do. It is not per se a theory of inferencing or ratiocination. In order to explain how learners can derive information from feedback and correction as a prelude to learning some new part of the second language, I will need such a theory of inferencing. I shall, therefore also draw heavily on Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) Relevance Theory. Both theories will be presented in some detail in subsequent chapters. They are necessary supports for a demonstration that feedback and correction has a role in any theory of adult SLA.7 Notice that such a demonstration will not arise just from amassing a large amount of empirical data showing that the provision of feedback coincides with behavioural changes among targetted groups of learners. In other words, I might have attempted to show merely that learners appeared to know things after having received feedback or correction, that they did not know before, and that they were able to act on the basis of that knowledge. Or, I might have shown that learners have somehow acknowledged the provision of feedback and correction. This has been the tack of the interactionist approach to input (see Pica 1994; Wesche 1994; Long 1996, for state-of-the-art reviews of a large number of empirical studies). It is important to show that there is an empirical phenomenon to investigate. If the provision of feedback and correction never is conducive to seeing changes in learners’ behaviour, and we conclude that it has no effects on the learning of any grammatical distinction, then that would be the end of the matter. But the demonstration that feedback and correction sometimes are effective will not substitute for a theory of feedback and correction. It will be the theory which provides an explanation and not the empirical facts. Although I have said before that the possible effects of feedback and correction in SLA is a matter for empirical investigation and not one to be settled by theoretical fiat (Carroll and Swain 1991, 1993; Carroll 1995b), and although data, my own and that of others working on this topic, will be presented and reviewed in Chapter 8, I will not be content to show that feedback works with this individual or with that one, for this problem or for that problem. The longterm goal is to develop an explanation of learning on the basis of this kind of input.

QUESTIONS, PROBLEMS, AND DEFINITIONS

7

The elaboration of such an explanation cannot proceed without participating in current debates about the causal factors in SLA. These debates have to do with the major theoretical question animating much SLA writing: What is the nature of the constraints on SLA? Question 4 What is the nature of the constraints on SLA?

I shall also explore this question. In SLA research, Question 4 can be broken down into three subparts: Question 4 (in more detail) a. What role does existing knowledge, in particular knowledge in the form of linguistic universals, play in determining the form of interlanguage grammars and the course of developmental patterns? b. What role does existing knowledge, in particular knowledge in the form of acquired knowledge from the first language, play in determining the form of interlanguage grammars and the course of developmental patterns? c. How are novel forms of knowledge created?

Question 4a is the UG question: How does Universal Grammar constrain the processes that form grammatical categories and construct linguistic representations? Question 4b is the transfer question: How does knowledge of the L1 constrain the processes that form grammatical categories and construct linguistic representations? Question 4c is the creation question: How do we construct new grammatical categories and new linguistic representations? Can we do so uninfluenced by prior forms of knowledge? The answer to the last question, in this book, will be a firm “No.” Novel grammatical representations will consist of novel combinations of existing elements constrained in a variety of ways. I take very seriously the problem of constraining a theory of language learning to exclude forms, structures and generalisations which in fact no learner ever seems to acquire. The theory of language learning to be presented here is, moreover, embedded in a modular theory of the mind in the precise sense that UG provides a repertoire of representational primitives and combinatory operations which no learning mechanism can countermand or override. New representational primitives and new combinatorial operations cannot be acquired. Within these constraints and others to be mentioned as we go along, there is still much room for talk of learning. But before we turn to the theoretical debates, let us start with some definitions.

8 2.

INPUT AND EVIDENCE

Definitions: stimuli, intake, and input

2.1 Stimuli and transducers: the first level of processing It is standard practice in the SLA literature to refer to the speech that learners hear in meaningful contexts as input, borrowing a term from the Artificial Intelligence literature. Most writers, however, do not bother to define what they mean by the term. In some cases it is clear that what is intended is some kind of physical entity.8 Input in this sense consists of events effecting the visual and auditory perceptual systems. They can be understood to be acoustic-phonetic events, in the case of speech, or graphic objects, in the case of written text, produced by an individual for some purpose on a specific occasion. These events and objects are observable by third parties; they can be recorded, are measurable, analysable, and hence objectively definable. They are the “stuff out there” which we will need to refer to from time to time, although in my view this constitutes the least interesting aspect of a theory of input. Let me introduce the term stimuli into the discussion and refer to all such observable instantiations of the second language with this word, using the standard terminology of the psychology of learning.9 This means that when people say that learning a second language requires exposure to the L2, minimally what they intend to say is that learning requires exposure to L2 stimuli. If you want to learn Ojibwa, you need exposure to Ojibwa stimuli, but if you want to learn Plains Cree, you need instead exposure to Plains Cree stimuli. It has been well understood for some time, however, that language acquisition depends not so much on what transpires in the observable environment, but rather on what transpires in the unobservable mind/brain of the learner. Learners can, on a given occasion, attend to some stimulus in the speech environment, process it, and acquire some bit of knowledge about the L2. On a different occasion, however, the same learners may not attend to the same relevant physical events, not process the relevant stimulus, and not learn anything about the language. From the learner’s perspective, these situations are quite different; you hear the L2 utterance in the first situation but in the second, you just don’t quite get it. To differentiate, therefore, between the observable stimulus and the information that the learner extracts from it, most researchers contrast input and intake (Corder 1967: 165, 1978: 82; Krashen 1981: 102; VanPatten 1993: 436). The minimal definition of intake is that it is some processed stimulus. By this, I mean that the stimulus has been mentally represented. We can contrast intake and stimuli accordingly by saying that intake is a mental representation of a

QUESTIONS, PROBLEMS, AND DEFINITIONS

9

physical stimulus, as Corder’s original discussions make clear. This leads to the question: What kind of mental representation is intake? Much of the interaction literature claims that intake is comprehended speech (Gass, MacKay and Pica 1998). Comprehended speech in turn corresponds to a speech signal which has been successfully parsed and re-encoded in semantic terms. Under this view, all grammatical learning would involve concept learning, since the properties of grammars would be derived from information encoded as concepts. Thus, the raw material for grammatical learning would be concepts encoded in what I am calling here conceptual representations. However, if this were literally true, then it would be possible for learners to reflect about all aspects of their own grammar learning since conceptual representations are also the representations in which we think. Learners ought even to be able to project the various aspects of grammatical knowledge into conscious awareness, since our semantic encodings appear to be the basis of our phenomenological experiences (Jackendoff 1987). There is, however, not a single shred of evidence that learners can think about the sounds of the speech signal in terms of the constituents and properties which must be acquired if they are to master the phonology of the L2. Thus, we have no reason to think that as learners learn the sounds of the L2, they decide to extract syllables out of the speech signal, or to break down syllables into sequences of consonants and vowels. No one says: “I must learn to hear the consonants and vowels of this noise you’re making” and even if they were to say such a thing, it would have no consequences for the learners’ actual experiences. Even highly trained phoneticians and phonologists hear the speech signal of an unfamiliar L2 initially as just a lot of noise and not as sequences of syllables or “words.” Similarly, there is no evidence that as learners learn enough of the L2 to begin to extract syllables, they simultaneously can think about them as morphosyntactic features and structures. The learner does not say: “Now I am hearing a subject and that word must be an auxiliary” even if the successful interpretation of the speech signal requires the analysis of the signal as an NP Aux sequence. I conclude that the view that intake is comprehended speech is mistaken and has arisen from an uncritical examination of the implications of Krashen’s (1985) claims to this effect. I discuss Krashen’s Comprehensible Input Hypothesis in some detail below so I will limit myself here to pointing out that comprehending speech is something which happens as a consequence of a successful parse of the speech signal. Before one can successfully parse the L2, one must learn its grammatical properties. Krashen got it backwards! Obviously, before we can sort out how information gets from the “outside” in to the learning mechanisms, we must first understand something about the nature of speech parsing in knowledgable and proficient hearers of a language.

10

INPUT AND EVIDENCE

In order to have a term which refers to minimally processed stimuli, I shall define intake in this book to be literally that which is taken in by the hearer, following Corder’s logic. Stimuli which make it into the system will be, moreover, characterised as transduced stimuli. Transducers are defined as analogue processors that convert stimuli available to the perceptual systems into neural signals that covary in a direct fashion with properties of the signal (Lowenstein 1960). In speech processing, for example, it has been hypothesised that speech signals are first coded in the peripheral auditory system when stimuli such as the bursts of noise associated with simple (or steady state) vowels and stop consonants occurring in consonant-vowel (CV) syllables trigger auditory-nerve activity. The sounds represented in phonetic transcription as /pa/ and /ba/ would be good examples of such simple syllables. The triggering events, here complex acoustic properties of the syllables /pa/ or /ba/, correspond in a direct way at this level of representation to the discharge patterns of the nerve fibres (Pisoni and Luce 1987: 27). So the discharge patterns of the nerve fibres instantiate the relevant acoustic properties. These analogue representations, however, are only the first stage in a series of complex transformations of the stimuli into discrete, structural representations. Keep in mind that the signal does not exhibit such discrete strings. Transduction and transformation of the signal are thus essential to linguistic representation of any sort. Once stimuli are mentally represented and “in the system”, other processors can extract additional information from them. See Figure 1.1.

specific acoustic properties of the linguistic stimuli

→ → →

analogue representations characterised in terms of varying discharge patterns of the auditory nerve

Figure 1.1. Transducing linguistic stimuli

Stimuli are thus converted into intake. Intake from the speech signal is, however, not input to learning mechanisms. Rather it is input to speech parsers. Parsers are mechanisms designed to encode the signal in various representational formats. They consist of various acquired procedures encoding grammatical distinctions and are tuned to the frequency of particular structures in the language the hearer hears. Good parsers are thus not only able to parse the sentence which has never been heard before, they are designed to operate very quickly on precisely those

QUESTIONS, PROBLEMS, AND DEFINITIONS

11

structures which occur over and over again. Let us think about language processing in terms of the functional architecture of linguistic cognition. It is commonplace to picture the mind/brain in terms of “black boxes” which operate on mental representations of information transforming them into other mental representations. See Figure 1.2. Conceptual representations ↑

(↓)

↑

Processor n ↑

(↓)

↑

Analysed and represented output Processor 3 ↑

(↓)

↑

Analysed and represented output Processor 2 ↑

(↑)

↑

Analogue representation of the stimuli Processor 1 ↑

(↑)

↑

Potential stimuli Figure 1.2. The relationship of stimuli to input

Note that in a modular bottom-up only system, the direction of information flow would be in a single direction only. The arrows in parentheses in Figure 1.2 are designed to raise the possibility that information can also flow “downwards.” Models of speech processing which permit information to flow in both directions are commonly called interactive. The model adopted here will be partially interactive in that it treats the phonetic and phonological processing as bottom-up to the point of lexical selection. See below. Functional architecture pictures of this sort treat mentally represented information as the input and output of various processors. Input is therefore not something “out there” in the external environment; it is, like intake, a purely mental construct. Moreover, input need not be restricted to representations transduced from proximal stimuli. It also can consist of second-order representations

12

INPUT AND EVIDENCE

which convert intake into structural representations. And in interactive models of processing, input can also be mental representations stored in longterm memory (LTM) and activated to participate in some processing. In such models, input can also be mental representations created afresh from inferencing, problem-solving or ratiocination of the “I just sort of dreamt it up” variety. In Figure 1.2, each level of represented information serves as input to the next processor and is the output of the processor which created the relevant representations. 2.2 Modularity and the Comprehensible Input Hypothesis Saying even this much about input, admittedly not much at all, requires making certain assumptions about language processing and language processors. I have framed the definition of input in terms drawn from classical structural theories of information processing. These theories claim that mental processes are sensitive to structural distinctions encoded in mental representations (see Carroll 1989b: 535–43, for more discussion from an SLA perspective). According to this approach to cognition, input is a mental representation which has structure. Classical connectionist approaches to linguistic cognition (Rumelhart and McClelland 1986, 1987; Gasser 1990; MacWhinney 1987a, b, 1992, 1997), on the other hand, explicitly deny the relevance of structural representations to linguistic cognition, claiming that linguistic knowledge can be encoded as activated neural nets instantiating, e.g. concepts, and linked to acoustic events merely by association.10 Classical connectionist approaches therefore allow talk of stimuli and intake (transduced information), processes, and even mental representations, but they do not allow talk of mentally represented structure. Anyone who is convinced that the last 100 years of linguistic research demonstrate that linguistic cognition is structure dependent — and not merely patterned — cannot adopt a classical connectionist approach to SLA.11 I happen to be convinced that linguistic knowledge is structure dependent — indeed dependent upon just the sorts of structural distinctions that grammarians like to talk about (dominance, precedence, sisterhood, c-command, etc.). I will therefore assume throughout that language is mentally represented in terms of structures, and that constructing a model of language processing and language processors involves being explicit about the structures that are being built, and modified. In the previous section I defined input in a way that information is not restricted to what is derived on-line during the bottom-up processing (from signal to construal) of a linguistic stimuli. See Figure 1.2 again. Schwartz (1986, 1987, 1993; Schwartz and Gubala-Ryzak 1992), in contrast, claims that input for second language acquisition is derived solely from the analysis of intake by the

13

QUESTIONS, PROBLEMS, AND DEFINITIONS

linguistic processors. She provides the view of processing shown in Figure 1.3, based on an interpretation of Fodor’s (1983) Modularity of Mind hypothesis and his theory of faculty psychology.

Vision module Things out there in the world (e.g. that what we see or hear)

Language module

Central processing systems

etc. Figure 1.3. A modular processing/learning model à la Schwartz (1993: 157)

According to Schwartz’ view, the perceptual and linguistic systems analyse linguistic stimuli and intake independently of a mental representation of the ongoing speech situation, of world knowledge, of information inferrable through visual or non-language auditory processing of stimuli in the environment, and so on. Since there is considerable empirical evidence for the interaction of conceptual information and the analysis of stimuli, ranging from phoneme restoration effects to word recognition (see Jackendoff 1987, for a summary), Schwartz’ argumentation hinges entirely on the nature of on-line language processing at critical decision-points. Since Schwartz’ claims, if correct, would preclude any role for feedback and correction, or indeed for any metalinguistic information, in grammar acquisition, they must be examined closely. I will come back to her arguments in Chapter 7. Despite the fact that Schwartz (1987) claims to be re-interpreting Krashen’s proposals, quite a different view of input is provided by Krashen, who has articulated what he calls the Comprehensible Input Hypothesis: … in order to acquire, two conditions are necessary. The first is comprehensible (or even better, comprehended) input containing I + 1, structures a bit beyond the acquirer’s current level, and second, a low or weak affective filter to allow the input “in.” This is equivalent to saying that comprehensible input and the strength of the filter are the true causes of second language acquisition. (Krashen 1982: 33)

Krashen refers to stimuli which are comprehensible, i.e. which the learner is capable of comprehending, or which are indeed comprehended by the learner. Comprehensibility is not the same thing as parsability. We may be able to provide a construal for a string like My walk walk longtime you see — perhaps “I walked a long time in order to see you” — without being able to parse it.

14

INPUT AND EVIDENCE

Indeed, we may infer that talk of input “beyond the acquirer’s current level” means “beyond what the learner’s parser will now parse.” Krashen therefore appears to be saying that the mechanisms responsible for grammar learning are operating on the basis of semantic representations despite the fact that the learner’s parsers cannot parse the speech the learner is hearing. The Comprehensible Input Hypothesis therefore requires an interactive, possibly non-modular mind, with information from the conceptual system determining the construction of linguistic representations in the grammar. The Schwartz model does not require that intake be comprehended in order for language acquisition to take place on the basis of an analysis of it. Indeed, given that comprehension is the end-point of processing in her model, it could not play a role in the acquisition of phonological or morphosyntactic knowledge. For Schwartz, the comprehension of the stimulus must be irrelevant to grammatical restructuring; for Krashen, however, the comprehension of the stimulus is a precondition for the acquisition of structures not currently part of the learner’s interlanguage grammar. A position like Krashen’s is spelt out explicitly in Faerch, Haastrup and Phillipson who appear to adopt both the distinction between input and intake, as well as the Comprehensible Input Hypothesis:12 Some of the input can be interpreted directly by means of the knowledge the learner already has of the foreign language (the learner’s “interlanguage” knowledge (…) This means that the psycholinguistic rules (…) which a native speaker has used in order to produce the language are matched by rules in the learner’s IL system. The learner can also interpret input by means of inferencing strategies (…) by making qualified guesses as to the meaning of input (“top-down processing”). The result may be total or partial comprehension, or there may be a residue of input which is incomprehensible. (Faerch et al. 1984: 187)13 Foreign language learning presupposes input which is made comprehensible by means of inferencing and not by the direct application of a psycholinguistic rule. To continue with our metaphor from computer science, we can refer to those parts of input which satisfy the conditions we have just specified for learning to take place as : intake is input which affects the learner’s existing knowledge of the foreign language.14 In Figure [1.4], (b) refers to intake. (Faerch et al. 1984: 188).

The picture they present is shown in Figure 1.4.

QUESTIONS, PROBLEMS, AND DEFINITIONS

Comprehensible input

Incomprehensible input

      

15

a

can be interpreted directly by means of a learner’s existing IL knowledge

b

can be interpreted by means of inferencing procedures

c

cannot be interpreted

Figure 1.4. The Comprehensible Input Hypothesis (Faerch et al. 1984: 187)

According to this view of learning, it must be the case that conceptual information can interact with the learner’s grammar. Finally, the assumption that meaning can determine the course of acquisition is a necessary part of the Interaction Hypothesis of Long (1980), who argues that learners’ grammars change as a result of conversational interactions in which native speakers are forced to simplify their speech (to accommodate the limited comprehension of the learners) while learners are obliged to elaborate their speech in the face of their conversational partner’s failures to comprehend them.15 There are two ways to interpret the claims of this literature. One is to say that comprehension of the meaning of a stimulus is sufficient for linguistic development. If you understand the meaning of an utterance, then you can learn its form and grammatical organisation. A stronger claim which emerges from this literature is that comprehension is necessary for acquisition. If you don’t understand the meaning of an utterance, then you cannot learn its form and grammatical organisation. Under either interpretation, it must be the case that representations of meaning can interact with those parts of the acquisition mechanism responsible for learning the sound system and the morphosyntax of a language.16 If modularity can be shown to hold in the strong sense of Schwartz, then the Interaction Hypothesis must be rejected. If modularity can be shown to hold in the weaker sense that I argue for, then the Interaction Hypothesis will require some serious emendation. I shall have more to say about both Schwartz’ version of The Modularity of Mind Hypothesis and the Comprehensible Input Hypothesis/Interaction Hypothesis in subsequent chapters so I will reserve making detailed comments about them until then. Suffice it to say here that the contrast between them brings out one important fact, which is that we will not understand the nature of SLA by studying the putatively objective properties of the stimulus. What matters for

16

INPUT AND EVIDENCE

language acquisition is how stimuli are analysed. This processing is not directly observable. It cannot be directly measured. At best we can make inferences about it on the basis of other observable events such as the utterances that learners produce, the interpretations they assign to utterances they hear or read, the time it takes them to interpret an utterance, their judgements of the acceptability of utterances, etc. These events must be construed as the outward consequence of internal events which we can only study in the context of a theory of language processing. The scholarly disagreement between Schwartz, on the one hand, and Krashen, Faerch et al., and Long, on the other, does not hinge on logical properties of the SLA problem. It hinges on matters of fact, namely, on how linguistic stimuli are processed. Consequently, to explore the relationship between language acquisition and the speech events in which learners find themselves we will necessarily have to spell out what language processing is like. Much of this book is dedicated to doing just that. 2.3 Processing in the Autonomous Induction Theory In the theory being expounded here, language processing is both autonomous and interactive. The various representational systems needed to encode acoustic, articulatory, phonological, and morphosyntactic representations in interpreting the speech signal or in articulating our ideas are all distinct and not reducible to any other. Speech processing is both bottom-up and top-down. In contrast to the above-mentioned authors, I use the term input to refer to any mental representation which is analysed by a processor. A possible picture of input is shown in Figure 1.5. The first thing to do in developing an explanatory theory of input is to make a distinction between these inputs to speech processing and input to learning mechanisms. In the theory of speech processing adopted here, the input to a processor (either on the signal-to-interpretation side of things or on the conceptto-articulated speech side) is any representation which can be “read” by the procedures of that processor. Procedures encode acquired grammatical distinctions and so are the by-product of language acquisition. In the theory of acquisition to be elaborated in this book, novel encoding of information is triggered by on-line events related to the processing of a speech stimulus. In particular, I want to claim that the novel encoding of information occurs when parsing fails. Input to the parsers is therefore necessarily different from input to the acquisition mechanisms and we must be clear about which one researchers are referring to.

QUESTIONS, PROBLEMS, AND DEFINITIONS

Input types

Processing mechanisms Auditory nerve fibres

Linguistic stimuli ? ? Phonological representations Word class features, number, gender, & other morphosyntactic features, subcategorisation

17

? ? Lexical activation

Syntactic parser

Conceptual category, theta roles (maybe) s-structure representation lexical conceptual representations of words of the s-structure

Conceptual Interpreter

argument structure default conceptual structures provided by various Mental Models Figure 1.5. Types of possible inputs during speech processing

2.4 Positive and negative evidence, positive and negative feedback I can now rephrase Questions 1–3 as: What role is played by input (to learning mechanisms) derived from stimuli, input (to learning mechanisms) derived from inferencing, and by input (to learning mechanisms) derived from feedback and correction in SLA? In order to answer this question, we must make a distinction between positive and negative evidence, and positive and negative feedback. The term positive evidence occasionally is used to refer to physical instantiations of the L2. This usage fails to do any work and should be given up. Sometimes it is used to refer to analyses of linguistic stimuli in the sense that I have so far been using the term input, as is the term primary linguistic data. In other

18

INPUT AND EVIDENCE

words, the stimuli give rise to a particular form or meaning as a consequence of parsing. Positive evidence in this usage refers to the output of the parsing system, and not to input to acquisition mechanisms. If one thinks about it, however, the term evidence refers to proof of something. Positive evidence should therefore be thought of as stimuli which provide evidence for a particular analysis. Researchers who work on language processing often talk of cues in precisely this way. In German, the occurrence of an AdvP at the left edge of a sentence is a cue for the presence of a verb in Comp, e.g. the sequence Gestern at the left edge of a matrix clause will be a cue that the next constituent may be a tensed verb — Gestern habe ich meine Pfingstrosen geschnitten (‘Yesterday have I my peonies cut’) and not an NP or a pro-NP, e.g. *Gestern ich habe meine Pfingstrosen geschnitten (‘Yesterday I have my peonies cut’). If we say there is no evidence for the learner for a particular analysis, then, we are claiming that there is no stimuli which can reasonably be analysed in a specific way. I have said that language acquisition will take place when parsing fails. Therefore the absence of evidence for a particular parse will coincide with the triggering of the acquisition mechanism. What is positive evidence for SLA? Since we have said that acquisition begins when parsing fails, the evidence for a novel analysis cannot come from the speech signal. At the moment of parse failure, the parser is attempting unsuccessfully to complete a bottom-up analysis. Thus, positive evidence cannot be literally in either the speech signal (it doesn’t instantiate grammatical constructs) or in the partially parsed representation the parser has attempted to build. At best, what can be meant is that once the learning mechanisms have somehow arrived at the appropriate information needed to successfully parse the previously unparsable, then that entity can be construed as the element which caused grammatical learning. This hardly advances our understanding of acquisition, but it does allow us to distinguish between stimuli or input (to a parser) and the stimuli or input which cause parsing failure. Let’s agree to refer to the latter with the term positive evidence. The term negative evidence is usually used to refer to information derivable from strings which are not part of the grammar of the language which the learner is to learn. Since the strings do not occur in the language, the potential for confusing input to parsing and evidence for learning does not arise. Illformed strings are not parsed by definition. How do such strings provide evidence for the acquisition mechanisms? Since I am interested in how information could be derived from such ill-formed strings, it won’t do to merely construct examples. The term negative evidence will be used here to refer to representations which can be defined neither as an intake representation of a stimulus nor as a parse of a given bit of intake (since the string is not part of the language), but which

QUESTIONS, PROBLEMS, AND DEFINITIONS

19

nonetheless convey information about structures of the language to the acquisition mechanisms. The sentence in (1.2a) can motivate some positive evidence about word order in a learner of English whose grammar cannot yet analyse NP V infinitival complement structures. The sentences in (1.2b–c) are the basis for deriving negative evidence about English word order. (1.2) a. Jessica likes to go to circus school. b. *Likes Jessica to go to circus school. c. En anglais, le sujet logique d’une proposition ne doit pas normalement, dans une phrase déclarative, suivre le verbe principal à temps fini. ‘In English, the logical subject of a proposition in a declarative sentence normally does not follow the tensed main verb’

The sentence in (1.2a) instantiates the information that in a declarative sentence in English the logical subject of the proposition       , namely , instantiated by a form Jessica, may appear to the left of the form likes to go to circus school, which instantiates the predicate.17 Grammarians usually shorten this complex statement by saying that the subject (or S) in English precedes the verb (or V). Under current generative assumptions, it is assumed that the subject NP is the daughter of a Tense Phrase or an Infl Phrase (see Pollock 1989), occupying a so-called specifier position. If the learner’s grammar does not have any representations of sentential structure, and the learner’s parser has no parsing mechanism which will permit the analysis of Jessica as an NP-subject which must be attached as a left branch of a Tense Phrase, then the parser will break down in attempting to analyse Jessica. See (1.3).18 (1.3) Current input and current parse Input: Jessica Analysis: NP Attachment rules: None Addition to the parser which must be acquired by the learning mechanism: “Attach NP-subject as left branch of Tense Phrase” Tense Phrase NP N Jessica

20

INPUT AND EVIDENCE

Once the learning mechanism has successfully added the correct parsing procedure to the parser, it can be said that (1.2a) provides positive evidence to the learning mechanism that the subject precedes the verb in English. A successful parse of the sentence will in fact deploy this information (once it is represented in a parsing procedure). This sentence, of course, instantiates many other things as well, and hence could provide the learning mechanisms with evidence for many other distinctions. Sentence (1.2b) is an artefact. It is not a naturally occurring utterance used in normal communicative situations.19 It has been created by placing the tensed verb in the first position of the sentence. The asterisk “*” indicates that the string is not a possible sentence of English (accepting the cautionary remarks of endnote 19). The string plus the intended meaning given in the proposition        together with the conventional interpretation of the asterisk, and the comparison with sentence (1.2a) provide the negative evidence that the verb and the subject cannot appear in the positions given. Thus, a learning mecanism would need to combine all of this information to represent the facts. Let me emphasise this by rephrasing the point: the negative evidence that in a normal declarative sentence in English the verb cannot precede the subject arises as an inference from the form-meaning correspondence *Likes Jessica to go to school/      , the interpretation of the asterisk to mean           , and the systematic comparison of the starred form and the well-formed string Jessica likes to go to circus school. The string (1.2b) has no intrinsic properties making it evidence for anything; the evidence only arises through the described inferencing. The string in (1.2c) also permits the same inference, for anyone who can comprehend it. Once the string has been interpeted, it can be used to make inferences about the position of the subject and the tensed verb in English sentences. It thus instantiates in French information about word order in French (and thus might provide a mechanism learning French with positive evidence) but it expresses information about word order in English. It licenses inferences about French grammar as positive evidence, and licenses quite different inferences about English grammar as negative evidence. To sum up, positive evidence is evidence for a particular analysis of a stimulus which the learning mechanism uses to encode a category, a parsing procedure and/or an interpretation of linguistic stimuli. It is the entity which requires restructuring the grammar and/or the creation of new production schemata. The evidence will often not be directly encoded as physical properties of the speech signal, rather it can emerge in any of the mediating levels of

QUESTIONS, PROBLEMS, AND DEFINITIONS

21

processing, or via the conceptual system. Negative evidence, in contrast, cannot be derived bottom-up by the parsing and interpretation of a linguistic stimulus since, by definition, the information would have to be derived from sentences which are either not parsable or not interpretable. Rather, negative evidence emerges as result of a complex inferencing process which must work top-down and which involves a systematic comparision of an analysable string to an unanalysable string, or some other inferencing process which leads to the conclusion that some property is not part of the grammar of the language. Since, by definition, the systematic comparison of representations cannot be based on the on-line bottom-up analysis of a string, it is important to ask just where and how these representations are being generated. If the story here is correct, they must be generated as conceptual representations, raising the problem of how the conceptual system could accurately encode the grammatical properties needed by the performance systems. While it might be the case that conceptual structures could encode as concepts information directly relevant to the contents of a separate mental grammar (understood as sets of rules and categories), there is no reason to assume that conceptual structures could encode the procedural information needed to parse a representation. The term feedback will be used to characterise particular kinds of utterances which are produced by, for example, native speakers, but which are used by learners to derive positive and negative evidence about the second language. The term is designed to draw our attention to the fact that feedback occurs as a response to something the learner has said or done and only counts as feedback for the purposes of language acquisition if the learner so construes it. Feedback is a general category which includes repetitions of things the learner has said, anticipating and “filling in” things that the hearer expects the learner to say, questions about intended meanings, statements of a failure to understand, and so on. Since the constructs positive evidence and negative evidence have focused on the role of information in the learner’s processing system, it would be useful to have some terminology to distinguish what the respondent is reacting so. Feedback can be directed at pronunciation, the appropriateness of a word choice to express a given idea, word order, morphological wellformedness, or any other aspect of grammatical organisation that people are capable of reacting to and commenting on. It is also produced as a consequence of interactions which have language at their centre. Since language can convey information about anything that we can communicate about, it can also be used to make commentary about itself. Interactions in which one speaker makes comments to another about that person’s use of language can be said to provide that person with feedback about his language use. They can be an attempt to confirm that some expression or

22

INPUT AND EVIDENCE

sequence is well-formed, or else they can be an attempt to state that some string produced by the learner is not well-formed. I will call the first type of feedback positive feedback, and the second type will be called negative feedback. I give an example in (1.4).20 (1.4) a. b. c. d. e. f.

A: is it [flanz6nkatal"g]? B: [katalo˜g® ] nicht [katal"g], we don’t have ["]. It’s so easy. A: Yes, but is it [flanz6nkatal"g]/[katalog] B: /[katalo˜k] … yes A: I mean is it plural in this sort of compound or what? B: [pflanz6n] yes

The L2 learner in example (1.4) wanted to know what the correct form was of the German version of plant catalogue. She had been looking at a British seed catalogue and had noticed that British English differs from her North American variety in using a plural first element, e.g. plants catalogue, drugs problem, weapons trade, etc.21 This raised the possibility that German compounding might follow either the British model or the American one. Her initial question was designed to confirm that German compounding follows the British model. The learner was thus attempting to elicit feedback about morphological structure. Her interlocutor, however, couldn’t get beyond her non-native pronunciation and decided to correct that instead. He offers two corrections of the initial pronunciation (1.4b, d), explicitly mentioning her faulty pronunciation of the final vowel in (1.4b), and implicitly correcting her pronunciation of the final consonant. He thus provided (negative) feedback that her pronunciation of the compound is not permissible. The confirmation that the first element of the compound is indeed plural in the interlocutor’s final utterance (1.4f) can also serve as an instance of feedback — positive feedback this time, telling the learner that her surmise was indeed correct. To summarise: negative feedback is an utterance which is normally intended to communicate the information that something is not possible in a language. Positive feedback is intended to license the inference by the learner that something else is. Ordinarily, negative feedback signals trouble in the communication while positive feedback is rarer.22 We also use positive feedback to confirm that we are attending to a conversation, e.g. although our heads are hidden behind a newspaper or our ears are covered by headphones. In other words, we provide positive feedback in precisely those cases where our interlocutor has reason to believe that communication might not be successful. There are certain environmental settings where positive feedback is commonplace. The language classroom is one case. It is well-known that language teachers will respond “Yes” to

QUESTIONS, PROBLEMS, AND DEFINITIONS

23

ill-formed utterances and to wrong answers as part of a didactic practice to elicit speech from L2 learners (Chaudron 1977). Frequent use of positive feedback is thus one of the characteristics of teacher talk. Evidence from memory Evidence from stimuli

Analysis & Representation

Evidence from visual perception Evidence from inferencing Etc.

Figure 1.6. Positive and negative evidence

Developmental psycholinguists have developed a separate terminology for stimuli that purportedly are both positive feedback and positive evidence: models and recasts. A model is any utterance offered by the native speaker which the learner is supposed to construe as positive evidence for some analysis and as the proper way of saying something. A model is therefore not merely positive evidence, it is also a stimulus with metalinguistic implications. The learner must infer that the interlocutor is saying “This is the way to say ‘X’ …” Note that in the normal course of conversation any utterance uttered might lead to the same inference but typically does not. We normally do not construe utterances as models because we normally do not consciously process them for their mediating form but rather for their meaning.23 Models are utterances which have been assigned a role as exemplars of specific form-meaning pairs. Unacceptable sentences can be modelled. In the linguistics literature, they frequently are. A recast is a reformulation of a learner’s faulty utterance in response to its illformedness. It can be seen as a particular subtype of modelling. A recast is also to be construed as saying “This is the way to say ‘X’ …” In addition, it is supposed to license the construal “Don’t say ‘X’ the way you just said it!” It can be thought of, therefore, as positive evidence or negative evidence depending on what construals the learner actually makes. It can be construed as positive feedback and negative feedback depending on what intention the native speaker has. In (1.4) above, B’s first utterance (1.4b) is a recast, offering a model of the proper pronunciation, and explicitly rejecting A’s pronunciation. That A draws the correct inference can be seen from the fact that she repeats her L1-based pronunciation of Katalog, hears it, recognises that she has made an error and immediately corrects her pronunciation herself. See (1.4c). B’s second utterance (1.4d) is also a recast, attempting to draw A’s attention to her faulty pronunciation of the final

24

INPUT AND EVIDENCE

stop consonant which is devoiced in German. In this instance, A heard the utterance, understood the utterance as a recast, but chose to ignore it, since she already knew that German voiced stops devoice in syllable final position. This second recast therefore has no effect. 2.5 Competence and performance, skill and control, faculties, and abilities I have emphasised that I am interested in the analyses that the learner assigns to particular stimuli but that to study them we are obliged to make inferences about them on the basis of learner behaviour. To facilitate the discussion, I should introduce further terminological distinctions here. The first is the now traditional distinction between competence and performance. The term competence is used to mean a number of quite different things in the linguistics literature. It is important for us to be clear about which ones are useful for SLA. On the one hand, competence is sometimes defined as the knowledge that an individual has in some cognitive domain. Linguistic competence is thus said to be knowledge of a language however it happens to be represented. This knowledge might correspond to a psychogrammar — defined here as the grammatical information used in parsing and producing a language. Or else, linguistic competence might be any representation of linguistic information, regardless of how, or indeed if, it is put to use. Chomsky has thus argued in a variety of places that an individual can possess linguistic competence in this sense even if he could never express the knowledge in his behaviour due to some physical impairment, for example. There is also another quite different use of the term, however, also found in the linguistics and philosophical literature. Chomsky has used the term to refer to the knowledge of an ideal speaker/hearer living in a homogeneous community who knows his language perfectly (Chomsky 1965: 3). Since such individuals do not exist, it is impossible to directly observe competence in Chomsky’s sense. Competence of this sort is not a construct equivalent to some individual psychological system, which may be why Chomsky subsequently introduced the term I-language to designate that system. In this book, therefore, I will reserve the term competence for Chomsky’s idealised notion, or when quoting others, and use the term I-language to refer to all aspects of the individual’s knowledge of the language, regardless of how idiosyncratic that may prove to be.24 Note that the term I-language is still neutral as to how and where the knowledge is represented. It will certainly include the psychogrammar, but it could also include metalinguistic information encoded in the speaker/hearer’s conceptual system. Thus, when an individual examines the string (1.2b) and makes a

QUESTIONS, PROBLEMS, AND DEFINITIONS

25

classification judgement to the effect that (1.2b) is not a possible sentence of English, the conceptual representation encoding that judgement is encoding knowledge of English. In the case of L2 learners, I will also occasionally follow traditional practice and refer to the I-language of the L2 as the interlanguage. When I want to focus on specific aspects or components of the I-language, I will refer simply to the relevant knowledge system, e.g. the phonological system, the morphosyntactic system, and so on. Performance is normally defined as the actualisation of the linguistic knowledge system in concrete situations — what the individual actually does, subject to shifts in attention and interest, memory limitations, etc. (Chomsky 1965: 3). This construct has been much criticised as inadequate to account for the relationship between knowledge and behaviour. Its purpose originally was to legitimise talk of knowledge, to distinguish between knowledge and the behavioural manifestations of that knowledge, and to make the case that cognitive psychology should have as its object of study and explanation the knowledge systems, rather than behaviour tout court. See Chomsky (1980: Ch. 1–3) for relevant discussion. Elbers and Wijnen (1992), however, note that a distinction must be made between a learner’s actual behaviour at any one time, and the abstract processing mechanisms which underly or potentiate performance. In order to comprehend speech, to read a text, to speak, or to write a sentence, knowledge must be put to use. Putting knowledge to use requires the development of complex procedures which select and integrate representations before actualising them in motor or interpretation programs. The deployment of knowledge of language may be expert or inexpert, mature or immature, in addition to being subject to shifts in attention, interest and memory limitations. This observation has led to the creation of constructs designed to capture behaviour-based knowledge. One well-known construct is procedural knowledge or the implementation of knowledge “on-line” in working memory (Anderson 1983: 10–11). A slightly different way to think about procedural knowledge is to define it as the encodings of grammatical information in parsing and production systems.25 Consider the case of an L2 learner of German. One thing that must happen is that the person develops procedures to analyse representations of embedded sentences with verb slots in final position. This is not merely a requirement for production, although we know that putting tensed verbs in the right position is a problem for L2 learners (Clahsen, Meisel and Pienemann 1983; Clahsen 1984, 1988; Meisel 1991). It is also a minimal requirement for comprehending German speech. A speaker of a subject (S) verb (V) object (O) order language like English who transfers parsing procedures to German, a language which is SVO in matrix sentences but SOV in embedded sentences will

26

INPUT AND EVIDENCE

have comparatively little problem processing German matrix SVO sentences even in the early stages of acquisition (as long as those sentences contain known vocabulary). However, working memory will often not be sufficiently large to accommodate a parser building a representation of an embedded sentence word by word. This is what must happen when the learner initially hears an SV daß SOV sentences (= SV that SOV). It is well known that working memory is quite limited in the number of unrelated items it can hold and process (see Eysenck and Keane 1995: Ch. 6). In Miller’s (1956) famous paper on memory, he estimated that working memory could deal with between 5 to 9 unrelated items. Processing sentences or other input of greater length is assumed to involve “chunking” or grouping elements into larger units in such a way that capacity in working memory is freed up. Chunking is precisely what the unskilled hearer cannot do. Alternatively, we might think of the difference between expert and inexpert parsing as the ability to activate pre-compiled chunks with which to analyse incoming material. Novices must construct the parsing routines in realtime. Now, analysing a verb is essential to finding out who did what to whom in a sentence. If a learner cannot chunk the lexical items comprising subjects and direct objects, and if the verb is further away than the magical number 7 (plus or minus 2), then the learner will simply “lose” the incoming message stored briefly in verbal memory. The memory trace of the analysed and represented sounds (phonetic and phonological encodings) simply fades away before the sound sequences of the final items can be reanalysed as syntactic and semantic units.26 This ability to put knowledge to use Elbers and Wijnen call skill, following wellestablished traditions in the psychology of learning. I will adopt this terminology too, keeping the term performance for the individual, context-specific behaviours. Bialystok and her colleagues have drawn a distinction between components of skills, namely analysis or knowledge and control.27 Analysis here does not refer to processing in general (the way I use the term) but rather to the specific analysis of information into conceptual representations (or propositional or declarative knowledge). Unanalysed knowledge is knowledge which is not so rerepresented in conceptual terms.28 Unanalysed knowledge can be put to use in speaking and hearing, but tasks such as making acceptability judgement tasks, performing grammatical analysis consciously, or writing sonnets, so the claim goes, require analysed knowledge. The distinction that Bialystok is making is an important one, although the choice of terminology is not especially felicitous. To avoid confusion, I will adopt a terminology drawn from Karmiloff-Smith (1992) and talk about representational redescription. Karmiloff-Smith (1986, 1992: 15) argues that the same information can be represented in a variety of representational formats and that skill development involves a cyclical process by which

QUESTIONS, PROBLEMS, AND DEFINITIONS

27

information stored in special-purpose (autonomous) representations is made available progressively to other cognitive systems by increasing the level of explicitness of the encodings. From the perspective of Representational Modularity, representational redescription amounts to information in autonomous representations of the parsing and production systems being gradually put into correspondence with representations in a conceptual representation, where it can be put to use for conscious reflection, performing particular kinds of metalinguistic tasks, and so on. Alternatively representational redescription means that information is reencoded into phonological representations which can be projected into conscious awareness (Jackendoff 1987). In the theory of functional architecture adopted here, it is these phonological representations which serve as the basis for thinking about language and which are probably the point of departure for acceptability judgement tasks. In the Bialystok and Karmiloff-Smith models, there are no obvious constraints on how representational redescription occurs. In the model developed here, in contrast, it is assumed that the architecture of linguistic cognition imposes quite severe constraints on which autonomously represented knowledge can be redescribed. It is claimed, for example, that the featural contents of conceptual and phonetic representations are not re-representable in phonological representations so that we are never consciously aware of either semantic or phonetic features of speech.29 Whether the model adopted here is compatible with Bialystok’s assumptions is not clear and will not be pursued.30 Control in Bialystok’s model (Bialystok 1986a, b) involves the ability to focus attention on various dimensions of a task in order to do it. The development of expertise necessitates the development of control in this sense. Producing a simple sentence in an L2 involves organising a message, selecting suitable lexical items to express that message, grouping those lexical items into a surface structure (a linear and hierarchical syntactic structure), mapping the syntactic structure onto prosodic structures, and articulating the motor-articulatory schemas of the phonetic representations. Beginners cannot do all of these things at once, although they may possess all of the necessary information encoded in partial representations, and must attack the problem of production bit by bit, practising, making errors, being corrected, and practising some more. It is an interesting question whether control is involved in the development of parsing and comprehension skills. Clearly, there are differences in the way beginning and advanced learners process stimuli, which involve, in part, their ability to chunk and deploy analysed information. There is no evidence, however, that focused attention is involved in improving one’s ability to do this. Rather, something happens during development, outside of our awareness, beyond our

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control, such that stimuli that were formerly incomprehensible suddenly become comprehensible. To the extent that the Analysis and Control model has nothing to say about this, it is incomplete.31 Moreover, as a model of language learning, it is also fundamentally flawed since it provides neither a theory of I-language nor a theory of how I-languages change. Why these weaknesses are so basic will become clearer in Chapter 2. It seems to me, however, that the basic distinctions Bialystok is making, based on the idea that control varies in terms of task demands, will be an essential part of any theory of skill development. Indeed, it is a robust finding of much psycholinguistic research that behaviour fluctuates in terms of the demands of the task being done. It is well established in speech production that the same learners may manifest different degrees of control of syntactic properties of English depending on whether they are performing a written manipulation task or speaking spontaneously. Research on speech perception reveals similar taskspecific variability. Janet Werker and her colleagues have demonstrated that the ability to make certain acoustic-phonetic discriminations disappears with age. Indeed, although children appear to be born with the ability to make certain linguistically relevant featural discriminations, and quickly manifest the ability to make other (possibly all) linguistically relevant perceptual distinctions (Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, and Vigorito 1971; Streeter 1976; Jusczyk 1985, 1992), they fine-tune their perceptual systems to the specific properties of the stimuli within the first year of life. This means that some distinctions which are discriminable at birth, or shortly after, are no longer discriminated later on (Werker and Tees 1984a; Werker and Lalonde 1988; Werker and Pegg 1992).32 Nonetheless, the ability to make discriminations among sounds not part of the L1 does not necessarily disappear for all or even for most types of features (Tees and Werker 1984; Werker and Tees 1984b). When adults are required only to discriminate between exemplars exhibiting L1-non-distinctive phonetic features, they can often do it. Interestingly enough, this ability is task-specific; embed the same sounds in a word recognition task and they cannot discriminate the relevant features (see Wode 1992 for further discussion). Therefore, the well-documented problems that adult learners have in mastering and accurately producing new segmental categories in the L2 (Flege 1991, 1992) cannot be explained entirely on the basis of differences in perception and in the absolute representability of sounds. Rather, the ability to perceive and represent acoustic-phonetic distinctions is also dependent upon the level of processing carried out — processing in what Werker and Logan (1985) call “speech mode” interferes with the ability to make certain discriminations which can be made nevertheless when processing in a less demanding “phonemic mode.” Processing in phonemic mode involves processing

QUESTIONS, PROBLEMS, AND DEFINITIONS

29

sounds qua sounds rather than, e.g. processing sounds in order to recognise words.33 These differences between native speakers and L2 learners can thus be characterised in terms of differing abilities to analyse and deploy the information in the stimulus relative to other types of information available in specific perceptual tasks. Other confirmatory evidence comes from research on memory and learning which shows systematic dissociations on distinct memory tasks. This research has led to what is known as the processing account of memory. According to Morris, Bransford and Franks (1977), memory for some particular bit of information improves to the degree that the type of processing needed to perform a given memory task is the same type of processing needed to encode or learn the information. See also Roediger (1990). The basic idea is that there is a transfer from the initial encoding to the performance on the memory task. When there is a dissociation between the initial encoding and the processing needed to perform a memory task, then the information must be re-represented to perform the task. There is a substantial literature showing patterns of dissociation on memory tasks performed by normal subjects, reviewed in Blaxton (1992). She then tested amnesic patients suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy on a variety of tasks. In one experiment, subjects were tested on 4 different memory tasks involving words, half of which had been previously studied, half of which were novel items. The first test was a word-fragment completion task in which subjects had to fill in the missing letters on stimuli such as _UT_E_FL_ (target = butterfly). The second test was a test of conceptual knowledge related to the selected semantic class, e.g. “What kind of insect are both the Monarch and the Queen Alexandra?” Answering such a question involves drawing on the knowledge that the Monarch butterfly is a sub-class of the superset . The third test involved semantic cued-recall in which subjects heard previously unstudied words (in the context, these were new stimuli), semantically related somehow to items previously studied, e.g. moth as a cue to butterfly. The fourth test was a graphemic cued-recall test in which subjects saw words graphemically like those studied, e.g. buttery. The hypothesis behind the design was that reading a list of words is a data-driven information-encoding task, and that generating a word on the basis of conceptual knowledge or semantic cues is a conceptually driven task. The memory tests can also be analysed in this way. Thus, the word-fragment completion test is hypothesised to be an implicit data-driven task, answering questions based on conceptual knowledge is assumed to be an implicit but conceptually driven task, the semantic cued recall is an explicit task which is conceptually driven and the graphemic recall task is explicit and data driven. The research question was: Given the nature of the encoding tasks, does it make any

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difference what the memory task is? The answer turned out to be positive. Amnesic patients performed best when there was a match between data-driven processes at learning and at test time. Their worst performance occurred when there were conceptually driven processes at both learning and at test time. Normal controls exhibited, as expected, similar dissociations. Subsequent experimentation showed that the amnesics were having particular difficulty with the generation tasks, and that there are important differences in the performance of left-temporal-lobe and right-temporal-lobe epileptics. One way to interpret these results is to say that performance on a given task type (data-driven or concept-driven) is enhanced when the memory task requires the activation of the same type of representations of the encoded information. The processing account of memory leads us to the conclusion that information can be encoded and activated in a task-specific way. Matching across learning and memory tasks thus involves “transfer” from the learning task to the memory task, which is just another way of referring to facilitation effects seen when the task-based encodings were the same. In Blaxton’s experiments, the processing account of memory forces a rethinking of such terms as “amnesic”, for her experiments clearly show that subjects could access memory traces on some tasks. We might expect that such research will also help us to understand the differences between expert and novice behaviour, since experts re-encode information in different ways as expertise develops. Novices, in contrast, appear to have single encodings of information. This point has obvious implications for SLA, since proficient speaker/hearers are none other than expert users of the language. Finally, recall that the hypothesis that information is first encoded in autonomous encodings is explicitly assumed in the theory of representational redescription. This idea can now be interpreted in terms of the processing account of memory. I conclude that discussion of control and the nature of encoding of information on specific tasks has a place in any theory of second language acquisition. The processing account of memory is a promising theoretical approach to the facts. I will continue to use the term ability as a way of talking about skills in abstraction from the specific demands of a task. This usage follows normal usage as when we say that Gisbert has the ability to play the piano or Alex has the ability to ride a bicycle. Finally, I will use the term faculty to talk in a general way about both the representations and mechanisms involved in deploying language. We will thus talk about the language faculty in contrast to the faculty for number, face recognition, or music.

QUESTIONS, PROBLEMS, AND DEFINITIONS

3.

31

A reformulation of the research questions

Now that we have some basic terminology, we can rephrase the research questions under investigation. I began by saying that I would be exploring the relationship between the language that learners hear (or read) and the knowledge of the L2 that they acquire. I can now reformulate this as (1.5): (1.5) a.

b. c. d. e.

What role is played by positive and negative feedback in forcing the learner towards a specific analysis of intake and intermediate input representations during language learning? How does feedback interact with positive evidence during the analysis of grammatical representations? What processing mechanisms must exist in order for feedback to be utilised? What is the relationship among the various processing mechanisms in a given faculty and the information they manipulate? How are representations of stimuli computed on-line?

SLA, indeed psycholinguistics in general, is not so far advanced that I can hope to answer these questions. Nevertheless, by exploring each one, I hope to cast input and evidence in a novel light, pushing us towards a different sort of explanation from those which are currently popular.

4.

Summary

In this chapter I have laid out the broad lines of the investigation into evidence, feedback and correction which will follow. I will examine the hypothesis that feedback and correction can cause the restructuring of interlanguage grammars, within a theory of acquisition called the Autonomous Induction Theory, embedded in a partially interactive theory of processing. I have also introduced some terminology necessary to conceptualise evidence, feedback and correction in information processing terms. In particular, I have pointed out that current Corderian terminology is inadequate, distinguishing only between some undifferentiated stuff “outside” the mind/brain in the environment and some undifferentiated stuff “inside” the mind/brain. I have instead distinguished between three broad categories of information in the information processing systems I shall invoke to discuss second language acquisition. The first broad category concerns representation types to the parsers, where I have distinguished (i) stimuli (= information entering the perceptual systems), (ii) intake (= transduced stimuli or

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analogue representations), (iii) input (= structured representations entering particular processors). The second broad category concerns information to the learning mechanisms. Here I have distinguished between two types of information. The first type is derivable from analyses of speech stimuli during parsing or inferences based on parsing some string which is part of the language (positive evidence). The second type is derivable via complex inferencing from conceptual representations encoding information about non-existent strings or unacceptable strings, or inferencing from feedback and correction (negative evidence). The third broad category concerns a distinction between the nature of interactions between learners and native speakers and the nature of the responses of native speakers to the errors and infelicities of interlanguage. Here I distinguished between positive feedback (confirmation that some form or string or interpretation is possible in the language) and negative feedback, which is intended to communicate that some form, string or interpretation is not possible in the language. Finally, I have been careful to distinguish between linguistic knowledge (I-language), the encoded information which is directly relevant to the parsing and production systems (the psychogrammar), skills (task-based encodings of linguistic information in parsing and speech production), and performance (what one does on a given occasion). With these distinctions in mind, I would now like to show why the Autonomous Induction Theory is needed.

Notes 1. To simplify the presentation, I will assume throughout that we are discussing adult learners who live and work in a community where the L2 is the language of official communication. I happen to believe that at the micro-processing level that I intend to explore here, the important situational differences which characterise language-to-(im)migrants and language-to-classroom-learners, differences which still need to be explored empirically and theoretically, will not matter much. 2. In my view, describing SLA as hypothesis-formation and hypothesis-testing is a misleading metaphor. In learning new categories of the grammar, new structural arrangements in on-line parses and hence new parsing procedures and new production schemata, learners are not learning new concepts. 3. At the very least one might ask for some solid psycholinguistic evidence to support it. In the mean time, many of us find it unhelpful to arbitrarily reallocate the terms acquisition and learning in the way Krashen does without ever defining what the processes actually consist of. In my view, Krashen’s terminological distinctions simply obscure analysis of the difference between representation and process. 4. Although reading texts in a foreign language plays an important part in classroom learning, I will have nothing further to say about it in this book. The significance of literacy for adult learners should not, however, be underestimated for many reasons, among them being that writing practices can provide many clues to word boundaries which the speech stream does not

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33

(thus giving the literate learner a leg up on constructing form-meaning associations), or that reading is often linked to vocabulary expansion. Through reading the learner can also better control the amount of exposure he gets; starting up and maintaining conversations for the purpose of just hearing more speech is not nearly so easy. 5. This remark should not be construed as saying that no other theoretical influences can be observed in SLA. Nothing could be further from the truth. However, to the extent that functionalists have contented themselves with descriptions of interlanguage varieties, and set aside the problem of constructing a transition theory, as we shall shortly call it, their use of semantic models cannot be described as “mainstream theorising” in the intended sense. Similar remarks can be made about the application of neurological theory in SLA. Finally, while the exciting research of the last decade on cross-linguistic speech perception (to be discussed elsewhere) has certainly influenced phoneticians and phonologists working in SLA, the significance of this work for characterising general aspects of SLA has not been seen. 6. This theory has been developed over many years, beginning with work which predates the current label for the theory, namely Jackendoff (1972). The first exposition of the theory appears as Jackendoff (1983), which was developed and extended in Jackendoff (1985, 1990b, 1992, 1995, 1996a, b, c). 7. I intend to demonstrate that the role of correction depends on a metalinguistic interpretation of a given stimulus. Since the ability to re-encode and conceptualise language in metalinguistic terms appears to depend upon cognitive developments which may, in turn, be linked to maturation, I will not discuss the role correction may play in either the simultaneous acquisition of two first languages (that is, child bilingualism) or in early child SLA. This book is about adult learners and learning by adults. I will simplify the exposition by omitting specific reference to adults except where I intend to contrast child and adult language acquisition. 8. Gass and Selinker (1994: 197), for example, refer to the speech stream as “input.” Towell and Hawkins (1994: 249) refer to “authentic data.” VanPatten (1993: 436) defines “input processing” as the conversion of linguistic data to that subset which is comprehended and attended to in some way through the mediation of various (unspecified) linguistic and cognitive factors. All of these discussions appear to regard input as outside of the cognitive systems which encode language. 9. In the Competition Model (see Chapters 2 and 3), cues are stimuli since they meet this definition of being objectively definable properties of the environment. In my view, cues should more properly be defined as properties of internalised representations, relatable to stimuli via parsing procedures. 10. I might add hear that we can talk for eons about association without necessarily knowing what we are talking about. Studies of animal learning have clearly demonstrated that animals show a remarkable sensitivity to probabilistic relations among events. As Kelly and Martin (1994: 113) have pointed out, these demonstrations reveal very little about the mechanisms underlying association or about what is actually represented. 11. This does not preclude hybrid approaches which resort to connectionist architecture to capture the lowest levels of information-processing but which also incorporate structure. I will have nothing further to say about this issue beyond saying that my approach to SLA is not in principle inconsistent with such hybrid functional architectures. See Goldsmith (1992) for discussion. 12. I am drawing conclusions here since the authors fail to cite either Corder or Krashen in their discussion. 13. It should be clear that Faerch et al. are not using the term “input” as I do to mean internal mental representations of structures but rather to mean “stimuli.”

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14. As in note 13, Faerch et al. are attributing a different meaning to their technical terminology from my definitions. Intake in this citation is intended to mean what I call input. 15. See also Long (1981, 1983, 1996) for additional discussion. 16. To anticipate discussion which follows, let me say here that both of these claims are false unless qualified. 17. I will capitalise semantic information and constituents following a practice introduced in Jackendoff (1983). Linguistic forms are italicised. 18. Parsing procedures will have to be redefined in Minimalist approaches to conform to the properties of the operation Merge which replaces X-bar theory. To simplify discussion, proper names will be analysed as NPs. DetPs will be used only where definiteness is critical to the discussion. 19. I sidestep a difficult problem here which is the definition of the term “normal language.” The fact that such strings regularly appear in linguistics texts serving as examples of what is not possible in English, and can be identified by knowledgeable readers of such texts in the intended manner, might be sufficient to define them as instances of naturally-occurring English used in normal communicative situations. 20. This example comes from a corpus that I have been collecting since 1992 of spontaneously provided cases of feedback and correction, occurring during normal conversation between adult second language learners and native speakers. In the example in (1.4), the learner is a native speaker of English learning German and the corrector is a multilingual native speaker of German. 21. These are attested examples. Lardiere (1995: 28), in a treatment of the Level-Ordering Hypothesis and the “No regular plurals inside compounds” claim, provides a critique of the American-based morphological literature which claims that such forms are impossible in English. Three years of watching SKY News have convinced me that they are not only possible but productive, with no idiosyncratic interpretation, just as Lardiere suggests. (Although Mike Sharwood Smith disagrees and has other intuitions based on his English- English variety.) This points to a standard problem that psycholinguists face, namely defining the object of study. No one can have intuitions about the “English language” because no one speaks that. Rather, each of us speaks a particular variety of it. A more cautious approach to grammatical description would see grammarians limiting their claims to the specific varieties which they do speak, and buttressing broader generalisations with facts drawn from corpus analysis. To the extent that ESL subjects are learning their English in an American context, relying on such descriptions may not be a problem for psycholinguists, if the language of the community happens to match the descriptions provided in the literature. This needs to be verified of course. It stands to reason that researchers whose subjects are acquiring English outside of the U.S. need to be doubly cautious in interpreting the facts of the “target” language, and are well-advised to establish local norms. In the case where subjects have little exposure to native-speakers this may involve testing the students’ instructors or collecting baseline data from language classrooms. 22. Since some researchers apparently treat all instances of use of the Gricean Cooperative Principle as “feedback” (see Allwood 1993), I should stress here that I do not. While there may be occasions where we would want to distinguish a response to a question from a topic shift, I will not treat answers to questions, responses to commands, etc. as feedback. My use of the term throughout is restricted to its role in language acquisition. 23. Notice that this allows two different ways for input to influence grammatical organisation. On the one hand, unconscious processes of parsing can operate to feed a sound sequence, a word, or a structure into the grammar. On the other hand, the same elements can be treated by the

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35

conscious system as a model, directing the learner’s attention to the formal properties of the stimulus. It is not clear to me whether the results will differ. 24. The psychogrammar is also an idealisation, inferred necessarily from the observation of behaviour. We attribute to it a direct causal role in explaining, say, Aunt Helen’s ability to comprehend and produce sentences like We went there for to visit Lee. Whether Chomsky’s concept of competence plays any direct causal role in explaining this ability is another matter. 25. I do not want to suggest that this is Anderson’s view. I am, in particular, not making reference to declarative knowledge since this is merely information stored in long-term memory, undifferentiated as to type or level of analysis. This distinction is critical for me. In addition, Anderson makes no assumptions of modularity of processing. 26. I can attest to the reality of the phenomenon, having lived through it myself. This anecdote is not, however, a substitute for an empirical investigation of the English-L1 learner’s parsing of verb-final German sentences at various stages of acquisition. 27. See Bialystok (1982, 1987, 1994), Bialystok and Bouchard Ryan (1985), and Bialystok and Sharwood Smith (1985). 28. The reader should keep in mind that in my framework it is incoherent to talk of “unanalysed knowledge.” Structural knowledge, by definition, is contained in a representation which is the product of analysis. 29. It does not follow that acoustic-phonetic information cannot be directly encoded in conceptual representations so that, for example, I can use aspects of it to imitate a British accent, write down a phonetic transcription of sounds I hear in the alphabet of the International Phonetic Association, or reproduce on demand for my German-speaking students the difference between my own Canadian pronunciation of the written form grass and the pronunciation indicated in the Oxford English Dictionary. In Jackendoff’s theory, conceptual structures are the level of representation at which information decoded from language meets information decoded from the perceptual and motor systems. Since we can talk about what we see, hear and do, it must therefore be the case that conceptual representations can encode phonetic representations, articulatory-motoric representations, 2 ½ D representations and so on. But since we cannot always think about the contents of these representations, the claim in the text means that I do not encode in my interpretation of sound strings a phonetic analysis of the phonetic features which make them up. 30. The psychological literature on learning and memory makes available a variety of models potentially of relevance here, e.g. data-driven vs. conceptually-driven processing models, implicit vs. explicit learning and implicit vs. explicit memory, declarative vs. procedural knowledge. See Eysenck and Keane (1995: Chs. 6 and 7). Ultimately, one would hope to see the constructs of analysis and control linked explicitly to some such model. 31. Hulstijn (1990) has mounted a more general critique of Bialystok’s work. 32. It follows that there are necessarily real representational differences between first and second language acquisition. On these grounds alone, we can reject the simplistic notion “L1 = L2” (Dulay, Burt, and Krashen 1982). 33. The full story on adult L2 perceptual abilities and their effects on the ability to acquire an authentic accent will therefore have two parts: the first part will detail the absolute loss of perceptual discriminatory abilities during the first year of life, the second part will show how processing speech to isolate lexical items interferes with the ability to detect sub-segmental features exhibited in those words.

C 2 Property and transition theories

1.

Why do we need the Autonomous Induction Theory (or something like it)?

1.1 What must an SLA theory explain? I have been careful in Chapter 1 to frame the discussion in terms of knowledge and behavioural change. A theory of second language acquisition must explain both. It takes behavioural changes into account as part of its observables. We are interested in describing and explaining how the ability to understand and produce the L2 changes over time. While it might be true that learners regularly undergo changes in their internal knowledge states, this will be of no consequence for our field unless those changes cause the learner to do things that previously were not doable. We are interested in internal states because they can explain behaviour. However, at the same time, we are committing ourselves here to a cognitive story — it is the nature of and changes in internal state that are the objects of analysis and theorising. Gregg (1993), citing Cummins (1983), states that explanation in SLA requires us to have two different but related sorts of theories: a property theory and a transition theory.1 The property theory will tell us how knowledge of an L2 is instantiated or represented in a learner, while the transition theory describes changes in what is represented, and also, when connected to some causal mechanism, explains how one knowledge state develops into another. No SLA theory will be explanatory without possessing both subparts, which is why in the face of numerous models, hypotheses and proposals, Gregg can maintain that we still have no real theory of SLA. On the one hand, much work in the past has failed to recognise the centrality of a theory of grammar as a property theory of SLA. Since the early 1980s, this problem has been addressed by researchers adopting the Principles and Parameters Theory (Chomsky 1981b, 1986: 243). However, Principle and Parameters Theorists in SLA have made little effort to develop a transition theory, and consequently, their results can only tell us part

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of the story, namely what the property theory has to look like. To put the matter more succinctly, talk of parameter-resetting is a description of the fact that one mental grammar has been restructured into another; it is not an explanation of how restructuring occurs. The challenges facing a theory of parameter-resetting are considerable, as we shall see below.2 On the other hand, only one serious proposal has been made to date regarding a transition theory, namely connectionism, more specifically as it is instantiated in the Competition Model (see Bates and MacWhinney 1981, 1987; and the papers in MacWhinney and Bates 1989) and explored in an explicitly SLA context by Gass (1987), Harrington (1987), and Kilborn (1987). The Competition Model, however, lacks a property theory rich enough to be taken seriously as an account of linguistic competence. Neither paradigm in its present form can be said to meet the requirements of providing both a property theory and a transition theory. Gregg can be read as claiming that once we have a theory of knowledge states (e.g. a theory of mental grammars) and a theory of how those knowledge states change over time, our work is over. We can then relax and go for a beer. I part company with Gregg on this point in that I think property and transition theories are still only one-half of the story. I have said above that a transition theory explains changes in knowledge states when connected to some causal mechanism. In my view, making that connection requires us to link a theory of representation to a theory of speech processing, and therefore ultimately to language behaviour. Another part of the explanation story therefore links the knowledge states and their changes to information coming from the environment or somewhere else in the cognitive system outside the learner’s grammar. Input to learning mechanisms somehow has to be brought into the equation and this cannot be done in the absence of processing theories which connect the knowledge states to speech in the environment or to information (stored elsewhere) which is applied to a linguistic problem. So, we require now three things: a theory of mental representations (i.e. of mental grammars), a theory of how mental grammars can restructure, and a theory of how learning mechanisms get access to stimuli or to conceptual information to reanalyse and encode grammatically during the learning process. But even this will not be the full story. We also need a theory of learning in addition to property, transition and performance theories. The learning theory will explain how restructuring takes place given the availability to the learning mechanisms of new information at some moment in time. Once we embed discussions of second language learning within a theory of speech processing, learning must be defined in several quite distinct ways: as the initial encoding in memory of a specific representation, as the entrenchment of that initial encoding so that it becomes easily activated, as the realignment of

PROPERTY AND TRANSITION THEORIES

39

previously encoded cues to an existing category, or, as what happens when parsing with extant parsing procedures fails. Speech processing theory cannot provide an answer to the question: What happens next? Only a theory of learning can do that. (2.1) What a theory of SLA must consist of: a. a theory of linguistic knowledge (a theory of mental grammars); b. a theory of knowledge restructuring (how the representations of a mental grammar can change in principle and, equally importantly, how they cannot); c. a theory of linguistic processing showing how input gets into the system from the speech signal (bottom-up) or from the conceptual system (top-down) thereby creating a learning problem; d. a theory of learning which shows how novel information (not brought into the system from outside the grammar by the parsers) can be created to resolve the learning problem.

Feedback and correction are sometimes presented as central elements of a general theory of learning designed to serve the functions of both a property and transition theory. Since a general theory of learning is intended to do the work of a particular theory of second language acquisition, we may conclude that feedback and correction are intended as central elements of a theory of SLA. Such a theory names induction as the principal mechanism responsible for both the properties of the L2 knowledge systems and for the changes observed in an interlanguage grammar when it restructures from one state to another, say, from one which cannot encode complement sentences to one which can.3 I intend to argue that induction is indeed needed to explain how truly novel information gets into the language processing system (2.1d above). I shall, however, take the position that induction, with or without feedback and correction, cannot properly explain the nature of the basic organisation of linguistic knowledge which manifests certain abstract universals unique to linguistic systems. Alone it cannot tell us, for example, why L2 linguistic knowledge shows sensitivity to constituents like phones, syllables or prosodic words.4 None of these constituents are present as objective properties of the speech signal. Rather, they must be attributed to the signal as part of a re-representation of it during the course of speech processing. But speech processors must somehow come to perform these re-representations which means that learners must come to mentally represent phones, syllables and prosodic words as part of a representational format. Induction cannot explain where the format comes from. Induction alone also cannot show why predication, one of the basic semantic relations, is constrained

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by c-command which is a structural relation defined over morphosyntactic representations. (See Chapter 3, note 33, for a formal definition.) Alone, induction cannot explain any of the abstract constraints which appear to be true of grammatical relations.5 However, given a suitable representational system, one constrained by properties of Universal Grammar, induction, coupled with a theory of input (including feedback and correction) along with the relevant performance mechanisms, can give a constrained and correct account of interlanguage grammars, of how one interlanguage grammar changes into another, and of how learners’ ability to understand and produce speech changes over time. I think that such an approach can give a better account than the current alternatives — the Principles and Parameters theory of Universal Grammar and the Competition Model — as they are currently applied in SLA research. 1.2 Problems with SLA applications of Principles and Parameters Theory The Principles and Parameters theory, henceforth P&P theory, suffers from two major faults, as it has been imported into SLA studies: It is incomplete as a theory of grammatical encoding, and it has been treated by many as a theory of transition. Let me take up the incompleteness argument first. By focusing on the agenda of UG research within grammatical theory, which is to whittle away language-specific details in order to zero in on the universal, P&P research in SLA runs the risk of simply ignoring most of what one would like to call knowledge of a second language. Variation is what P&P theory is designed for, but it limits itself to those aspects of variation which are not the result of learning. It therefore can only deal with part of the job. There are three distinct types of knowledge which P&P theory largely ignores. First of all, there is what we might call irregular variation, which derives from the fact that grammars of particular languages consist of information which is unsystematic or only partly systematic, information which simply does not lend itself to a characterisation in either general or parametric terms. As we know from descriptive studies of individual languages and cross-linguistic comparative research, languages vary sometimes considerably from one another in terms of their repertoires of constituents, the ways in which those constituents are organised syntagmatically and in how constructions correspond across levels of analysis. Some of this variation is just variety-specific. In his own writings, Chomsky has always acknowledged the necessity of describing and explaining the flotsam and jetsam of specific language systems (see Chomsky 1981a: 8). This type of linguistic knowledge often gets referred to as the grammatical periphery but this term is not well-defined. Certainly we have no reason to equate “peripheral” with

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41

“marginal” or “uninteresting” or “trivial.” The flotsam and jetsam must also be acquired and a language learning theory must therefore encompass mechanisms to do that job. Secondly, once we focus our attention on the fact that psychogrammars are the by-product of individual experience, we must grant that much linguistic knowledge varies from speaker to speaker.6 The theory of UG has nothing to say about idiosyncratic knowledge. We need a theory which will explain that I say [th6Áme:no] and you say [th6Ám":tho] while somebody I know from Kitchener Ontario says [th6Ámaeno]. Psychogrammars, the grammatical systems which we use in parsing and producing speech, are rich in such particulars. Only some of this variation will be explainable in terms of the norms and speech practices of the groups in which the language user holds membership. Some of it is just truly unique. Thirdly, research in sociolinguistics reveals variation in language use within a given language community of a rather different sort. Much of that variation is patterned and shared and can be explained in great detail in terms of the social contexts in which language is acquired and deployed, as well as in terms of the social symbolism features of language take on for members of a given community.7 P&P theory has nothing to say about sociolinguistic variation either. Moreover, certain kinds of sociolinguistic variation raise fundamental difficulties for grammatical theories which assume that mental grammars are homogeneous systems. Mufwene (1992) has argued that they are not, on the basis of variation in the use of the copula in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). Labov (1998) has taken up this issue, trying to sort out the logic of traditional assumptions. He points out (Labov 1998: 117) that the speakers of AAVE who are also skilled users of “other American dialects” (OAD, or, basically, the white varieties heard in the electronic media, and used in the school systems), might be seen to be in one of several distinct states. Thus, AAVE and OAD could be seen as separate languages or dialects (or grammars) and variation in use could be analysed as codeswitching. Roeper (1999) has argued for something along these lines for all users of a language. Variation within a learner’s language of the sort which might allow a child learning English to master and use productively verb-raising in a very narrow set of contexts (say the language of storybooks but nowhere else) would then be accounted for in terms of “bilingualism.” The child would have two distinct “grammars” and would “code-switch” between them. Understood properly, however, it is clear that the child might have a large number of grammars, each distinguished by its irreduceability to some other parametersetting. In the absence of clear situation-based definitions of the impetus for “code-switching”, this makes a mockery of the construct. On the basis of an understanding of perhaps a broader range of cases of variation, Labov points out

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the necessity of distinguishing other types. AAVE and OAD might be seen as distinct but interdependent systems (grammars). On this view, one of the systems may be incomplete and incapable of producing a full range of utterances, and is used merely to enhance the other. Speakers of English who systematically produce German names like Strauss with a palatal fricative (instead of a coronal fricative) might be subsumed under this type of variation. In this case, there is no fundamental incompatability among the rules used to articulate English spellings. Some items might simply be tagged [+German] and pronounced in a way that English-speakers think sounds German. Or, AAVE might be seen as a “mesolectal” or intermediate stage and OAD as the “acrolect” or highest stage on a creole continuum characterising the variation between the most creole-like grammar and the most standard-like grammar. In this case, one would expect to find implicational relationships among the varying phenomena. Finally, AAVE could be viewed as a de-creolised dialect of English with certain creole-like features remaining as historical residue. This view reduces AAVE copula variation to the flotsam and jetsam type. In his analysis of AAVE, Labov argues for parallel and co-existent systems. Observe that if UG were assumed to be the whole sum of grammatical theory, and one sometimes gets the impression from the SLA literature that UG is all there is, then that theory would fail as a property theory, regardless of whether it is applied to monolinguals or L2 learners. UG does not provide a way of accommodating variation. Those who blithely make assertions that linguistic knowledge is not to be described in terms of rules, learned exceptions to rules, or idiosyncrasies of other sorts because current conceptions of UG have no place for such constructs, have either not understood this basic point, or else they have decided not to participate in the development of a theory of second language acquisition. It requires a theory of linguistic competence which can describe everything that a speaker/hearer knows. For further discussion of these issues in the context of first language acquisition, see Meisel (1999) and Valian (1999). If it is legitimate to ask: What are the properties of interlanguage grammars? — and it is — then we need a property theory rich enough to describe and explain all of them. Psychology and psycholinguistics have every reason to be interested in not only variation but also variability and idiosyncratic knowledge since they show how language acquisition is guided (or not guided) by properties present in the environment. Researchers who are interested in how languages are acquired have the right to demand a property theory in which one can talk without embarrassment about context-dependent learning. Linguistic theory has been forced to grapple with the issue of language variation, first in terms of marked and unmarked rules, subsequently in terms of parameter-setting. But

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given the generative focus on the universal, it is hardly surprising that generative theory has tended to ignore forms of knowledge which are context dependent. Although many would readily grant that a theory of language acquisition needs learning mechanisms to acquire these aspects of linguistic competence, there has been little attempt within UG-based second language acquisition theory to develop independent models of learning mechanisms capable of explaining how learned properties of grammars get learned or even could in principle be learned. In the first acquisition literature, such independent models exist and are acknowledged even by those whose primary interest is the study of UG and what first language grammars might have to say about it. We return to such models in subsequent chapters. However, no such independent models exist yet in SLA.8 The L2 literature has focused exclusively on variation deemed to be under the control of UG — the parameter-setting part of the P&P story — and left apparently no room for the characterisation of the acquisition of instances, rules, paradigms, or exceptional phenomena.9 To the extent that P&P theorists in SLA have offered us UG as a property theory, we can legitimately regard it as incomplete. Note that given the way in which UG and mental grammars are characterised as autonomous and modular systems, it is not obvious how to repair this inadequacy. It will hardly do to suppose that a general theory of learning can be “stuck on” to P&P theory as a way of dealing with what has been acquired. General theories of learning are fundamentally incompatible with the P&P framework. An alternative solution must be found which respects the autonomy of the grammatical systems and allows for a fit between those aspects of linguistic competence deemed to be provided by UG and those aspects which are not.10 In addition, it is not obvious that parameter-setting has been good at resolving the central task it has set itself, namely explaining cross-linguistic variation. Theoretical work on grammatical variation has been reinterpreted in SLA as allowing for a restatement of the transfer problem (see Question 4b of Chapter 1). If the grammars of two distinct languages can be said to be characterisable in terms of different parameter-settings, then the knowledge systems of an individual who knows the one language and is learning the other can also be fruitfully characterised in terms of different parameter settings. The state of L1 knowledge can be said to consist of setting M, and perhaps that is what the learner transfers to the L2, but when he has indeed acquired the L2, he will be in a state of knowledge consisting of the distinct setting N. So the learner has to leave state M and enter state N; this is parameter-resetting. Lifting the curtain on the jargon, however, shows that this is just another way of saying that when the learner has successfully acquired the L2 he knows something different from what he knew before. P&P theory in SLA tells us nothing about how the change occurs;

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it can only inform us as to the properties of the states of knowledge themselves. And just what does it tell us? In my view, not very much when one looks closely at the relevant literature. For one thing, there is an on-going problem in the definition of the central theoretical constructs. Despite considerable activity in grammatical research trying to delimit a range of central parameters capable of explaining the discoveries of typological research, there is no agreement on even a handful of proposals.11 Every putative parameter with deductive potential has been picked apart and rejected as empirically and conceptually inadequate. This has become something of an embarrassment for SLA studies as researchers committed to the P&P paradigm have seen otherwise decent empirical SLA research undermined by that nagging critical voice which pipes up: “But no one believes in that proposal any more!” This puts the onus on SLA P&P researchers to continually reanalyse the same data set to make it theoretically acceptable to grammarians. See White (1995) for relevent discussion.12 One might instead ask: Why should grammatical theory be setting the research agenda of SLA? More problematic is the logic itself of P&P theory. It currently consists of lists of stipulations of ways in which languages can arbitrarily vary from one another. Grimshaw (1985) warned about the danger of calling every instance of linguistic difference a “parameter.” She pointed out that parameter-setting theory was interesting for acquisition purposes precisely because it attempted to explain clusters of effects in terms of a single abstract parameter. The clustering provided the theory with “deductive” consequences (Nishigauchi and Roeper 1987). In the intervening years, this constraint on the theory of parameters has disappeared; now any arbitrary distinction gets labelled a “parameter.” Why should we view this as an improvement on earlier versions of generative grammar? In the “old days”, linguists wrote rules with lists of stipulations of ways in which the rules could arbitrarily vary from one another. With time, it was recognised that this approach was not principled. The stipulations were replaced with more abstract and more general formulations of linguistic constraints. Stipulations of arbitrary lists of ways in which individual languages differ from one another are equally unappealing. It is inevitable that they will be rejected too. In recent publications, we can see the logic of Chomsky’s research agenda at work; arbitrary “parameters” are being replaced by more abstract and more general formulations of universal principles. In the most recent versions of generative theory, Minimalist Theory, and, more obviously, Optimality Theory, the formulations are absolutely universal — which raises some doubts about the future of parameter-setting within the generative paradigm. Again, White (1995) acknowledges the difficulties for SLA researchers; unfortunately, she offers no principled solution.13

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Lest I be misconstrued, let me point out what criticism I am not making of P&P theory or its proponents. I am not criticising those researchers solely interested in the question of how SLA research can contribute to the refinement of a theory of Universal Grammar. UG research has been extraordinarily rich and insightful and has made a major contribution to our understanding of human cognition. To the extent that acquisition research can support this approach, it is useful. More specifically, to the extent that SLA research can show that universals are manifested in interlanguage grammars even when the learning conditions of first and second language acquisition are radically different, it will have added significantly to our understanding of linguistic competence. To summarise, I claim that P&P theory fails as a property theory for SLA because it is incomplete and conceptually inadequate for our purposes. Developmental psycholinguistics requires a property theory of universal and of languagespecific phenomena. The more universal the formulation of parameters becomes, the more obvious it will be that UG will not provide the right property theory.14 It is unreasonable to expect those devoted to the pursuit of UG to provide us with one. Descriptive linguistics, first language acquisition studies and research in language parsing are more likely sources of the necessary information we need to construct reasonable models of the specific grammatical systems of individual speakers. We need such models to characterise the adult learner’s initial state (the L1 grammar). If we choose to define “successful L2 acquisition” as the acquisition of a grammar identical to that acquired by the monolingual L1 speaker/ hearer, then such models would also be needed to make that notion precise.15 Now let me turn to a consideration of P&P theory as a transition theory in SLA. It fails in this role too for a number of reasons. First of all, it fails to provide any account of why language learning begins. This is because none of the current P&P SLA theorising is connected to a theory of perception and language processing. It therefore also fails to explain why some phenomenon at a given point in time, and no other, gets acquired. Secondly, aside from some limited discussion of the Subset Principle (see, e.g. White 1986a, 1989b), no one in SLA has bothered to articulate a model of logically prior parameter-(re)settings for a given language such that a learner would need to set P1 before setting P2.16 Thus, the logical relations among parameters have yet to be worked out for the acquisition of any given language. Thirdly, no one in SLA has bothered to articulate the triggers for given parameters.17 Triggers are the logically necessary input to parameters, the minimal type of input for resetting to occur. Unless we know something about triggers, we cannot understand parameter-resetting.18 Triggers are to P&P theory what cues are to the Competition Model, but while proponents of the latter have worked out some of the details of cue extraction,

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cue validity, cue reliability, and cue conflict, no comparable research program has emerged in the SLA P&P literature.19 It will not do to cite learnability studies or research in first language acquisition as if they were a reasonable substitute for SLA activity. SLA researchers have to demonstrate the relevance of treatments presupposing monolingualism to a characterisation of acquired or incipient bilingualism. I suspect that defining “the same parameter” for distinct languages and isolating the relevant triggers for that parameter will turn out to be a complicated affair.20 Fourthly, although interesting results have emerged from research investigating developmental orders, SLA P&P theory says nothing at all about why the things which are first learned are learned first. Moreover, SLA research in this paradigm fails to explain why two different learners can follow distinct developmental paths, what Valian (1999) calls microvariation in development. This would require dealing with the variability issue which, as previously noted, P&P researchers cannot do. Finally, P&P theory also has no account of why language learning stops. There is a deep and difficult problem at the root of this question which involves explaining how learners can be simultaneously sensitive and insensitive to variation in the speech they hear. They must be sensitive enough to cognise, to use Chomsky’s (1980: 69) felicitous term, that what they currently know will not accurately represent what they are hearing. They must be insensitive enough not to detect and encode other types of variation in the speech signal once they have arrived at the right analysis. Otherwise, they would be constantly revising their grammars and would never settle on a final analysis for a given phenomenon. To mention a simple example, a learner of English whose L1 Spanish has null subjects has to detect and encode that subjects occur with extraordinary regularity in English in simple sentences, with weather verbs, presentational verbs and verbs like seem. But the learner cannot be so sensitive that she notices data like those in (2.2) and construes them as evidence that English, like Spanish, has null subjects in the relevant sense. (2.2) Q: Goin’ out? A: Dunno!

If the learner resets whatever parameter is responsible for explaining the difference between English and Spanish with regard to subjects (be it dubbed the ProDrop Parameter, the Morphological Uniformity Principle, or the Morphological Richness Parameter, it’s name is of no consequence to my argument), she should not re-reset the same parameter when she encounters (2.2), as she will if she is exposed to normal vernacular English. This difficult problem, dubbed the catapult problem of endless parameterresetting by Randall (1990, 1992) has been recognised in the first language

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acquisition literature (see also Valian 1990a, b). One proposal to deal with it is that there simply is no parameter-resetting (Bley-Vroman 1990; Clahsen 1990/ 1991; Müller 1994). Proponents of P&P theory in SLA have largely ignored this critical issue. It is complicated in SLA because we must factor in somehow the problem of the learner’s incipient bilingualism. How does an L2 learner decide on the evidence for a given analysis of a parameter? One issue we must address is the validity of what appears to be the default assumption in much of the SLA theorising that as far as parameter-setting is concerned, the learner’s grammars are always in separate “boxes” which never communicate with one another — at least not where parameter-setting is concerned. How else could one put aside the thorny question: How does a single mind/brain establish contradictory settings for the same parameter? SLA researchers appear to believe that the psychogrammars for the L1 and L2 are distinct and separate (in other words, that they are cognitively and functionally autonomous), so that parameter-resetting in the L2 cannot possibly negatively influence the parameter-setting in the L1. Consequently, the acquisition of a contradictory parameter-setting in the L2 does not cause loss of the parameter-setting in the L1. At the same time, however, we are required to believe that parameter-settings can transfer from one grammar to another, and that the grammatical systems can mutually influence one another in additional ways, permitting borrowing, code switching, lexical interference, the readjustment of linguistic category boundaries, language attrition, and so on. How grammars can be autonomous and permeable to cross-grammar influences at the same time is not clear.21 Further consideration of this issue is surely in order. Secondly, it is not obvious why the learner’s prior experience should be necessarily irrelevant for the analysis of the L2. If Finnish is defined as morphologically “rich”, how could a Finnish learner of French, German or English not find these languages morphologically “poor” in their manifestations of morphological marking of morphosyntactic categories? And would a Finnish learner of all three languages notice subtle differences among them which would be sufficient to account for differences in their use of subjects? This seems unlikely. It seems far more plausible to hypothesise that the explanation of the correlation between morphological complexity and the existence of expletive subjects and “obligatory” use of pronouns in non-focus contexts will require a more abstract solution than those proposed in the P&P literature. Finally, consider that in the more recent interpretations of parameter-setting, parameters have been hypothesised to be associated with the heads of particular morphosyntactic categories, more specifically with functional categories such as tense, agreement, or comp (Ouhalla 1991). Somehow, in ways which are not at all clear since paradigm learning is at stake, setting these parameters is said to take place

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“in the lexicon.” The exact properties of the lexicon are open to debate within linguistic theory. What matters for syntactic discussion is simply that the lexicon lies outside of derivational paths for particular sentences. So, parameter-setting is outside of the derivation of a specific sentence. At the same time, generative theory asserts that the lexicon is a memory store, in particular a storage place for the idiosyncrasies and irregularities which could only result from learning — in the conventional sense of the term. It follows that the mechanisms which are responsible for setting lexical parameters cannot operate until (possibly) domaingeneral mechanisms responsible for the induction of individual expressions from the stimuli available have done their work. This proposal makes parameter-setting and parameter-resetting dependent upon learning mechanisms in ways which have as yet not been explored in SLA and which can hardly be called trivial. Above we raised the issue of the functional architecture of the bilingual linguistic system. We can raise it again in thinking about parameters which are lexically expressed. One of the most vexed issues in treatments of bilingualism is the question of whether bilinguals have one lexicon or two, and how the lexical entries interact. The evidence that they do is compelling. See Pal (2000) for discussion. What the implications of interacting lexicons are for the analysis of functional categories and the re-setting of parameters connected to them has yet to be discussed in the SLA literature. All of the questions raised above are legitimate ones to be asked of a P&P theory parading as a explanatory theory of acquisition. Unfortunately, the questions are being asked by the critics of the theory and not by its proponents. It is the critics who have made plain that much current work in P&P theory has confused Gregg’s two types of theories, treating a property theory as if it were a transition theory. An acquisition theory must explain what causes grammatical restructuring and must describe its course. This the P&P theory does not do. I have concluded that parameter-(re)setting is an interesting metaphor, but ultimately one which will not stand up to close scrutiny. I see no reason, therefore, to contest claims by Bates and MacWhinney (1989: 71) that their Competition Model is the only theory which can claim to be a theory of language acquisition. 1.3 Problems with the Competition Model This said, I should add that being the only game in town does not mean that the game is thereby a winning one. The Competition Model suffers very much from its unwillingness to take seriously research into the nature of linguistic knowledge. Indeed, one may question the extent to which the “Competitors” understand contemporary theoretical linguistic research. On the one hand, one looks in vain

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in the Competitors’ publications for signs that structural constructs play a role in processing and acquisition, although it is now abundantly clear that no account can be given of linguistic knowledge without them. On the other hand, the Competitors refuse to question the relevance of the form- and meaning-related constructs they do adopt, as if it were somehow obvious that words and morphemes have psychological reality while c-command and the No Crossing Lines Constraint do not.22 It is as if the theoretical notions of American structuralism (constructs like phoneme, morpheme, word, or sentence) have ceased to have theory-dependent status simply because psychologists have heard of them (all other more recent theoretical developments being, in contrast, suspect). This is hardly a sensible approach to the characterisation of language. In addition, it is apparent that the Competitors gloss over important linguistic details in experimental work in an attempt to make induction and a structured environment the major explanatory factors.23 It is therefore obvious to many of us that structural representations have no explanatory role to play in this theory of language use. Since the Competition Model also purports to be a theory of acquisition it follows that the structural nature of grammatical representations can play no causal role in explaining the transitions between knowledge states. This remains true despite the rather frivolous response that Bates and MacWhinney (1989: 7) give to their critics.24 The reason is obvious: the Competition Model claims that the mappings between acoustic stimuli and semantic representations are direct. This means that there are really no psycholinguistically relevant mediating phonological or morphosyntactic representations. Any kind of grammatical or semantic primitive must be characterised in terms of patterns of activation of connected nets of nodes standing in for neurons. At best, therefore, grammar is a metaphor for an emergent or distributed knowledge fully characterised in terms of patterns of excitation of the auditory nerve, distributed patterns of node activation in the neural nets doing the cognitive work, and the weighted connections among them. I reject this vision of linguistic knowledge.25 Finally, at least some versions of the model (McDonald 1986; McDonald and Heilenman 1991) explain language development by assuming that incorrect interpretations are a triggering force. Incorrect interpretations are detected either when a given interpretation contradicts the state of affairs perceptible through other means than language, or when the learner is informed that his interpretation is incorrect. We have no evidence yet that this particular type of negative evidence has any role to play in the acquisition of the full range of types of grammatical knowledge.

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1.4 A third approach: the Autonomous Induction Theory I intend to take a route different from both of these approaches. On the one hand, I shall go beyond my original claim that feedback and correction have a role to play in adult SLA, to show how it might work. On the other hand, I shall elaborate an independent model of SLA called the Autonomous Induction Theory. It is based on a theory of cognition developed by Ray Jackendoff (1987, 1996a), called Representational Modularity. The Representational Modularity model posits that cognitive universals play a fundamental role in explaining what we know about language and how we come to know it. These universals include Universal Grammar, but UG is just one of several types of universals in the arsenal of the human cognitive system. It also starts from the assumption that the mappings between stimuli in the environment and meanings are crucially mediated by representational “languages of the mind” which have significant structural properties (Jackendoff 1992). These languages are quite distinct from one another, and cannot be reduced to a single general type. Representational Modularity is therefore incompatable with the view that there is a general theory of learning in which the same processes and constraints operate across all cognitive domains. The Autonomous Induction Theory adopts representational modularity. This assumption alone makes the Autonomous Induction Theory different from all other current proposals, including the Competition Model, and proposals by BleyVroman (1990), Clahsen and Muysken (1986, 1989), and Schachter (1992). It follows from the assumption of Representational Modularity that not everything that is representable in our conceptual systems can be encoded in our phonological or morphosyntactic systems, and vice versa. This means that there will be severe constraints on how conceptual information can interact with information encoded in the specialised representational systems. Consequently, there are important limitations on what feedback and correction can accomplish in initiating grammatical restructuring. However, the theory elaborated is compatible with the hypothesis that feedback and correction, mentally represented in conceptual representations, can have an effect on grammatical restructuring. This makes the Autonomous Induction Theory different from theories claiming that there is no negative evidence in SLA (Schwartz 1986, 1987, 1993; Schwartz and Gubala-Ryzak 1992) or no language acquisition based on metalinguistic information (Truscott 1998b). I take the view that the investigation of exactly what the effects of feedback and correction are can shed light on the nature of modularity and information processing. Indeed, I will argue that the study of adult SLA and, in particular, the study of the nature of the input and evidence to L2 grammatical

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acquisition constitutes an especially interesting domain for the study of psycholinguistic processing and representation. All of these ideas will be developed at length in other chapters. Here it suffices to note that the modular representational systems hypothesised provide the basic codes in which linguistic knowledge is discovered, represented, computed and stored. There is interaction among them but it is highly constrained. Despite its emphasis on universals, the Autonomous Induction Theory is nevertheless designed to provide a role for induction in explaining L2 development. To offer up a transition theory, it must focus in part on induction. Induction has not been a fashionable topic in second language acquisition research of late. Understanding why involves dealing with the so-called “logical problem of language acquisition.” This problem is based on a deceptively simple question: How is it possible in principle to acquire a language? For many years it has been suggested that if one is to answer this question there simply is no alternative to UG-based approaches to linguistic cognition. There is no alternative because induction does not adequately constrain language acquisition. The constraints problem then forces UG on us. This happens to be a statement that I agree with. But one can adopt a universalist/rationalist position with respect to the constraints problem without thereby rejecting induction and committing oneself to the claim that UG is a mechanism of language acquisition. Everything else being equal, one can adopt a universalist/rationalist position without claiming that UG is a unique mechanism of language acquisition. The solution is to carefully distinguish between UG’s function in the property and transition theories. 1.5 The limits of theism and deism as accounts of SLA Gregg analyses current views about UG in SLA, which he labels theism and deism. According to Gregg, theism corresponds to the position that “UG functions in SLA just as it does in L1 acquisition” (Gregg 1994a: 3723). Theism is not directly attributed to anyone, but since it is connected with those defending a P&P approach to SLA we may draw the inference that P&P theorists, and presumably also Gregg himself, are all theists.26 Such individuals hold the position that UG is “accessable” to adult second language learners and all conceptualise UG within the P&P framework. Deism, in contrast, corresponds to the view that “UG ceases to function once an L1 is acquired in childhood” (Gregg 1994a: 3723). A more concrete example of deism is the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis of Bley-Vroman (1990, 1994). The Fundamental Difference Hypothesis states that UG does not “operate directly”, and knowledge of

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UG, specifically knowledge of principles and parameters, is available only through the particular instantiations of principles and parameters in the L1. A similar position can also be attributed to Clahsen and Muysken (1986, 1989), to Clahsen (1988), to Meisel (1991, 1997), and to Schachter (1988, 1990, 1991). These scholars have all stated that first language acquisition can be characterised in terms of parameter-setting but adult SLA grammars do not conform to UG, therefore, UG is not constraining SLA and other mechanisms must be at work. Clahsen and Muysken go so far as to argue that interlanguages are not natural languages. A slightly different position has been articulated by Felix (1985, 1986), who claims that adults have “access” to UG but that this access is in competition with the operation of inductive mechanisms so that adult SLA must take a different course than L1 acquisition. In my view, Bley-Vroman’s influential papers have successfully muddied the learnability waters by confusing the constraints problem with the question as to why L2 learners know different things than L1 learners (the ultimate attainment issue). The Ultimate Attainment Issue is a very complex problem which has received only superficial treatment in the SLA literature. Part of the difficulty in understanding the issue is that many scholars appear to take it for granted that adults can never successfully acquire an L2. The position has apparently become a piece of dogma, especially among American researchers, for which no evidence is required. Thus, one need not define the construct “successful acquisition.” Some appear to believe that successful acquisition can only be defined in terms of the knowledge states and behaviour patterns of monolingual native speakers; this is not the only option and hardly a reasonable one unless one can demonstrate that L2 learners get exactly the same kind of stimuli. In contrast, successful acquisition can be defined with respect to the amounts and types of linguistic stimuli and derived input that learners actually get. Learners have successfully learned if they have constructed specific sorts of grammars on the basis of the input available to them — complete grammars if the input is complete, partial or deviant grammars if it is not. But one looks in vain for information about the nature of the L2 exposure of learners in studies investigating the Ultimate Attainment Issue (Do they hear 5 hours of the L2 a day? a week? a month? Are they communicating largely with monolingual native speakers or with other L2 learners? Do they hear embedded clauses? Topicalisations? Double object constructions? If so, how often and under what circumstances?) Nor are we informed about the bilingual speech practices of the “unsuccessful” learners so we do not know if they are using the L1 or the L2 or even an L3 much of the time. Until these questions are answered and systematically compared with careful analyses of what learners actually know and can do, no conclusions are

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possible about the potential ultimate attainment of adult learners. The fact that an immigrant can live for 30 years in a country with an official language and still speak it with an accent, or manifest imperfect control of the morphology of the L2 is hardly compelling evidence that adults are incapable of learning an L2. Indeed, serious research on the topic, to be discussed later, is turning up individuals who are both highly knowledgable and highly proficient in the L2. Finally, we might ask if it is reasonable within a plausible theory of bilingual cognition to define successful acquisition as meaning “knowing exactly and only what monolinguals know.” The differences observed between monolingual and L2 learner speech practices could be attributed to the fact that L2 learners are bilinguals. Or that they have had far less input, or far less practice of particular speech patterns, or have less highly automated retrieval of the L2 production schemata. There are countless ways to explain the fact that the “perfect bilingual” is a rarity.27 We need not resort to fundamental representational differences in FLA and SLA to account for that observation. To make a learnability argument, and to make the case for a fundamental difference in the nature of L1 and L2 linguistic knowledge, one needs to demonstrate that the the grammars of L1 learners and adult L2 learners are indeed fundamentally different. In my view, there is no convincing evidence for such fundamental representational differences, although the evidence for difference is increasing.28 That so many have been willing to jump into the water after Bley-Vroman shows that the issues are complex. We need not, however, feel compelled to discuss SLA in these terms. There is a third stance that one can adopt within a universalist/rationalist perspective, the stance I shall defend, which is that the “accessibility” debate between theists and deists is a debate about not much at all since UG is not a learning mechanism.29 Therefore, while it is possible to ask if interlanguage grammars manifest properties of UG, it is not possible to ask if adult SLA learners “access UG in exactly the same ways that infant L1 learners do.” These questions are not equivalent. The debate between theists and deists has been, however, only tangentially about whether interlanguage grammars exhibit properties of UG and has mostly been about whether the processes and stages of development are the same. In my view, the latter discussion misconstrues the nature of UG. UG can be understood as providing certain initial limitations on the representational systems used to encode language prior to linguistic experience. This means that for neonates about to acquire a first language, we can think about UG as the initial state of their knowledge.30 UG is not the initial state of knowledge for anyone who has had any kind of exposure to a language and is about to acquire another. Moreover, it is not a box in the mind/brain that the

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learner consults when building a grammar, as the access metaphor would have it. I like to think of it as an emergent property of all mentally represented grammars. The representational system of the newborn rapidly develops into a language-specific, multiply-differentiated system, closely attuned to certain properties of the stimuli which comprise the linguistic environment. This language-specific, multiply-differentiated system is consistent with analyses of UG. Rather than UG, it is the language-specific, multiply-differentiated representational system which is the initial state of adult L2 acquisition. Let me rephrase this hypothesis: The initial state of adult L2 acquisition consists of the L1-specific parsing procedures and production schemata, the L1-specific contents of the mental lexicon, and possibly some performance-independent knowledge store that we call the mental grammar of the L1.31 Consequently, this representational system is also consistent with analyses of UG. It is wrong-headed to characterise the differences between first and second language acquisition by suggesting that children “access” UG while adults do not. Neither group of learners is “accessing” UG in the sense that they are activating stored information in a UG-black box when they have to learn to represent, e.g. which lexical item in an incoming string is the tensed verb. When we abandon the dynamic vocabulary which theists and deists alike use, we no longer can ask: Do adult L2 learners access UG? This question simply makes no sense since the biologically-given initial representational capacity is not located somewhere to be accessed. The only linguistic representational systems which can be initially accessed are those in which the L1 is encoded. If we abandon the misleading access metaphor, we are suddenly free to ask a different question: Do adult learners in fact encode L2 stimuli in the same representational systems as those used to encode their L1? Or do they encode L2 stimuli in some other non-linguistic systems? The debate about the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis notwithstanding, I believe that the answer to these questions elicits some rare consensus in the field: “Yes!” This is my interpretation of the widely accepted hypothesis that adults transfer knowledge of the L1 grammar to the tasks of parsing and producing the L2. Transfer is just the name we give to the fact that L2 speech is encoded in terms of the same categories and patterns of the L1. Transfer appears to require as a logical necessity that the encoding systems of the L1 and the interlanguage be of the same type because transfer is the analysis of a phenomenon X as being an instance of category Y. I fail to see how such equivalence relations could be established if, for example, one were somehow to attempt to encode syllable structure patterns in terms of the dynamic properties of event structures, or the temporal properties of musical cognition. The very idea boggles the mind. In fact, although there is

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much talk about SLA involving other non-language-specific systems, no one has made any serious attempt to argue that phonological and morphosyntactic phenomena in interlanguage grammars indeed manifest the properties of other codes. Thus, the existence of transfer, indeed its prevalence in characterisations of L2 behaviour and L2 knowledge provides a strong prima facie argument for the hypothesis that interlanguage knowledge must be encoded in the same “languages of the mind” as those used to encode the L1. Having established that the same representational systems are used in parsing and producing L2 speech, precisely because transfer is so much in evidence, we can then ask: Do these representational systems manifest the same basic properties as those deployed by monolingual native speakers of the L2? The answer to this question must, in my view, also be “Yes!” The UG-based research cited above shows satisfactorily that interlanguages exhibit hierarchical as well as linear order, structure dependency reflecting knowledge of syllables and feet, maximal and intermediate morphosyntactic phrases, c-command, subjacency or other “island effects”, and other universal properties of natural language systems. No one has had great difficulty in applying the constructs of contemporary linguistic theory to L2 data, presumably because L2 grammars are fairly well-behaved, despite what Clahsen and Muysken (1986) assert. In short, there is an alternative position to the theist and deist positions sketched by Gregg which is consistent with the universalist/rationalist position.32 On the one hand, I deny that we will see evidence of UG in the interlanguage grammars only insofar as structures of the L1 are transferred into the interlanguage grammar, which is essentially Bley-Vroman’s position. On the other hand, I also deny that UG operates in L2 “as it does in the L1” because to claim this is to grossly misunderstand the putative biological basis of UG. At the same time, I deny the assertion that UG “ceases to operate” after childhood in the sense that language acquisition must then necessarily be caused by domaingeneral problem-solving mechanisms completely unrelated to linguistic cognition, and that interlanguage grammars are therefore to be expected to be rogue grammars. There is no evidence to date that domain-general problem-solving can explain any of the above-mentioned properties of interlanguages. Most claims that L2 acquisition takes place on the basis of problem-solving are not supported by any serious investigation of what these general problem-solving mechanisms are, or of how they would work. The one counter-example is provided by the various researchers associated with the ZISA project.33 The ZISA team applied to SLA proposals by Slobin (1973, 1977, 1979; Slobin and Bever 1982) made for primary language acquisition. The purpose of these proposals was to show how a learner could construct morphosyntactic

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representations either from a primitive semantic system or from a primitive perceptual system. In other words, Slobin was interested in developing a transition theory. Since Slobin rejects the hypothesis that linguistic cognition is grounded in Universal Grammar, which would delimit the basic nature of the child’s grammatical representations, his problem was to explain how the learner could create a grammatical mode of representation from some other non-linguistic mode. He developed a number of pre-theoretical strategies or procedures, his operating principles, which were designed to capture generalisations about the nature of early child language, while making minimal assumptions about the child’s a priori cognitive system, and which would amount to mappings from the perceptual and the conceptual systems onto morphosyntactic representations. Slobin originally believed these proposals would be domain-general but has since granted that they are domain-specific since they mention units which exist only in linguistic representations, e.g. “Pay attention to the ends of words” (Slobin 1985a: 1243). Their status in the current debate between theism and deism has therefore become unclear, but this is ultimately unimportant. Slobin’s proposals are in the end nothing more than descriptive generalisations desperately in need of a theory of semantics — to motivate the correspondences between the syntax and meaning — as well as a theory of sound structure and speech perception — to motivate the correspondences between the speech signal and the syntax. Since Slobin has no theory of structure, meaning or the perception of sounds, he has no theory of domain-general processes relevant for language acquisition. Neither do the researchers who resort to the same domain-general strategies to describe SLA. Thus, while the research which has emerged and continues to emerge from the ZISA project makes a major contribution to our understanding of L2 development, it cannot be used to assert that domain-general learning processes explain SLA (see White 1991b; Epstein, Flynn and Martohardjono 1996, for other criticisms, specifically of Clahsen and Muysken 1986, 1989).34 In addition, the argumentation of Clahsen and Muysken that interlanguages are not natural languages because they appear to require movement rules which are not structure-preserving, root or local transformations in the sense of Emonds (1976), while clever, is ultimately unconvincing. Clahsen and Muysken’s argumentation hinges solely on the properties of rules explaining the distribution of constituents in the learners’ speech across developmental stages. In other words, they claim that in order to explain transitions from one interlanguage grammar to another, one must postulate rules which move constituents to the right in a derivation, deriving a novel morphosyntactic representation (in something like the traditional notion of a surface structure) from some other more basic morphosyntactic representation (the canonical word order). Such rightward

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movement rules are excluded from current versions of UG. Therefore, so the argument goes, such grammars are not natural-language grammars. These properties, however, have to be attributed to the learners’ grammar only if one is also forced to grant the necessity of the assumptions displayed in (2.3–2.5) (2.3) that the data Clahsen and Muysken have at their disposal (spontaneous production data) is a direct reflection of the learners’ grammar and not a hybrid reflecting both properties of the grammar and the operation of the production system.

Since Clahsen and Muysken did not investigate what the learners could parse, we do not know if there were significant differences between what the learners could cognise and what they could control in production. We need not assume that production data is necessarily a faithful reflection of the learners’ cognised grammatical knowledge since there is independent evidence that learners learn specific phenomena (that is, mentally represent them) before they attempt to produce sentences containing those phenomena and long before they control the phenomena automatically in production (see Sharwood Smith 1986, for discussion). Moreover, there are good reasons to hypothesise that what learners can produce at a given moment in their linguistic development is severely constrained by the nature of the production system (see Pienemann 1998a, b). (2.4) that the data at their disposal informs us uniquely about the learners’ morphosyntactic systems.

Clahsen and Muysken simply assume that because they are interested in morphosyntax, their data is informing them about morphosyntactic representations and morphosyntactic operations in the interlanguage grammar. Another interpretation is, however, possible, namely that when learners are at the stage where they are consciously trying to correctly order lexical items in a sentence, they are manipulating prosodic constituents, namely prosodic words in prosodic phrases and intonational phrases. It could be argued, consistent with Jackendoff’s (1987) position that we project prosodic representations into conscious awareness, that what learners align when they consciously construct output strings which are different from the over-learned patterns which the L1 production system makes available, are prosodic constituents. In other words, when learners are consciously trying to put the verb in the right place, what they are manipulating are prosodic constituents in the initial construction of a phonological production schema. C-command is irrelevant to prosodic structure, and prosodic constituents have a much flatter organisation than syntactic structure (Nespor and Vogel 1986). It remains to be seen if realignments of prosodic constituents violate principles of UG.

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(2.5) That the operations used to describe post hoc changes to an interlanguage grammar can be equated with the derivational operations of the mental grammar.

This assumption is essential to buttress Clahsen and Muysken’s conclusion that the data from their L2 learners provide evidence of rules which are not permitted by UG, namely right-ward movement rules. To make this argument, we must assume that learners are attempting to establish Slobin’s canonical word order, that is to say, a prototypical “basic sentence.” This construct is, however, not obviously compatible with the grammatical theory which Clahsen and Muysken adopt. There certainly is no reason to assume that the learner’s mental grammar at the “verb-final” stage comprises a subject verb object order to which some kind of rightward movement rule must apply to get the constituents into the correct surface order. Indeed, there is no reason to assume either that learners create a canonical word order to which leftward movement rules apply to derive actual utterances.35 It is just as plausible to assert that the developmental change involves adding an additional representation to those already encoded which directly reflects verb-final order. Under this view, the learner constructs a variety of representations for each sentence type and none need by regarded as more “basic” in the sense that other sentences are derived “on-line” from it. The learner thus maintains all previous encodings but increases over time the accessing of those which more accurately match the L2 input.36 To summarise, one need not grant any of the points which the Clahsen and Muysken analysis require. Therefore, we need not assent to their claim to have shown that interlanguage grammars are non-natural grammars. Here is just once instance where the failure to be precise, in psycholinguistic terms, about the exact relationship between grammatical theory, psychogrammars, the functional architecture of the language faculty, and one’s data set leads to problems of interpretation. What ought to strike even the casual observer is that Clahsen and Muysken’s argumentation is really too clever. They do not attempt to claim that interlanguages do not exhibit truly fundamental properties of natural languages such as those mentioned above, although there is no reason to expect such properties to emerge in interlanguages through the application of general problem-solving mechanisms or Slobin’s operating principles. Similar remarks can be made of Meisel (1991, 1997). Meisel’s careful analyses demonstrate quite clearly that child L1 learners and adult L2 learners are constructing different representations and are sensitive to different sorts of properties in the input. There can be no doubt, given Meisel’s analyses, that L2 acquisition is not “just like” L1 acquisition — a conclusion which will be further substantiated elsewhere in this book. Moreover, Meisel’s conclusion that parameter-resetting gives

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a poor account of the L2 data appears to me to be correct. It does not follow, however, that UG has no part in a theory of SLA. It follows even less that general problem-solving mechanisms can provide a better explanation. In short, I think the critique of universals in SLA is baseless. The real problem is the invocation of parameters to characterise linguistic change and to serve as the sole or major mechanism in a transition theory. We need to rethink all of these claims and to return to a consideration of the basic problem Slobin was attempting to explain in the context of first language acquisition: How does the learner acquire linguistic knowledge on the basis of the speech in the environment? Or, what are the answers we must give to our Questions 1 to 4? Let us return again to Question 1: Question 1 What is the nature of the raw material on which particular grammatical generalisations are formed?

My answer to this question is that the raw material depends entirely on the nature of the grammatical phenomenon to be acquired and on the nature of the representational system in which that phenomenon will be encoded. The raw material of learning is not, therefore, the objective material of the speech signal.

2.

Summary

In this chapter I have been concerned with the essential properties of an explanatory theory of SLA. Following Gregg, I have argued that we need a property theory which defines for us the essential properties of grammatical systems and a transition theory which tells us how grammars can change. In addition, I have argued that we need a processing theory which will tell us how stimuli and input can enter the linguistic system. Finally, we will need a theory of learning to tell us how information becomes accessible to the learning mechanisms. Neither the P&P theory nor the Competition Model captures all four aspects. The Autonomous Induction Theory does.

Notes 1. See additional discussion in Gregg (1994a, b, 1996). 2. The same problems face the avatars of P&P theory, namely Minimalism and Optimality Theory.

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3. A second mechanism linked to learning models is association, exploited in SLA research largely by connectionism, embodied in the Competition Model (Bates and MacWhinney 1981; Bates, McNew, MacWhinney, Devescovi and Smith 1982; Bates, MacWhinney, and Kliegl 1984; and especially, MacWhinney 1987a, b, 1989, 1994, 1995) and in Anderson’s Adaptive Control of Thought model (Anderson 1983, 1985). The Competition Model has spawned some very interesting investigations into preferred analyses of sentences by bilinguals under informationally reduced conditions. Some of this research will be discussed in more detail later in the book. The ACT model gets occasional mention in the SLA literature, see Towell and Hawkins (1994), or Johnson (1996) but to my knowledge has been largely ignored in empirical studies. I will have nothing further to say about it except to point out that no theory of language acquisition based on simple association will ever explain the complexity of the linguistic competence of L2 learners. Anderson (p.c., 1995) grants that a priori knowledge must play an important role in explaining linguistic competence. As he put it so succinctly: “Language is different!” 4. See Brière (1968), Selinker (1972), Tarone (1972), Flege (1987), Flege and Munro (1994), and Carroll (1992) among other studies for empirical evidence as to this sensitivity. 5. It is still an open question as to what the most basic properties of interlanguage grammars are, and what constitutes convincing evidence for knowledge of language-specific universals. At the earliest stages of linguistic production, for example, interlanguage grammars have been said to provide strong evidence for a paratactic organisation involving, among other functional properties, adjacency but specifically not embedding, see, for example, the discussion in Sato (1990: 29 et passim). Despite claims to the contrary, however, (see Perdue 1996), L2 learners do not, in fact, produce strings clearly contravening the c-command constraint on predication. Strings like in my apartment no good are not multiply ambiguous and, in particular, are not construed — and are not intended to be construed — as saying any of       ;     ,      ; or   ,         (or reference to some other contextually desirable but not physically present object). In this string, the learner correctly maps a  onto a PP, followed by a negation intended to deny the principal predication. Modifiers operate locally (itself a notion requiring constituency) and predication applies (as required by English) to the left, not to the right. All of this suggests knowledge of the relevant underlying structural distinctions. Equally important, there is no evidence that if learners heard such a sentence as in my apartment no good, they would attempt to construct any of the interpretations just given. Learners ability to make use of local relations in constructing interpretations of utterances must also be explained. In addition, what has been glossed over in most of the literature discussing paratactic organisation, is that such strings preserve the prominence patterns of English prosodic phrases (prominence final). We can just as readily conclude that at this stage of development, speech production is constrained by what the learner can simultaneously encode syntactically and map onto a Prosodic Utterance. It may be that syntactic complexity gets sacrificed in the interest of prosodic wellformedness. This might be either a problem arising from inadequate linguistic encoding or it might be a performance problem arising from the learner’s inability to simultaneously process several levels of encoding within the constraints imposed by working memory. Only appropriate empirical studies will shed light on this issue. Finally, I should say something about subjacency in interlanguage grammars since both Schachter (1990) and Johnson and Newport (1991) have argued on the basis of data involving acceptability judgement tasks that L2 learners do not cognise subjacency in the L2. I am presently sceptical of the validity of these conclusions because acceptability judgements tasks are metalinguistic in nature (Birdsong 1989; Schütze 1995) and, therefore, as will be argued here, involve information encoded in the conceptual system. Since learners are not producing strings which violate subjacency, I take this as evidence (admittedly weak

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evidence, but evidence nonetheless) that interlanguage grammars do not violate subjacency. Alternatively, some scholars (Berwick and Weinberg 1984; Hawkins 1994, 1996) have argued that subjacency is a property of the morphosyntactic parsers. Whether subjacency then belongs to the learner’s interlanguage grammar will then depend upon how this term is understood. 6. Some researchers have taken variability to be an essential characteristic of interlanguage grammars (Tarone 1988). Others have argued (Singh, D’Anglejan, and Carroll 1983) that there is no evidence that interlanguage grammars are more variable than monolingual ones. 7. See Labov (1963, 1966, 1972a, b), Trudgill (1972, 1974), L. Milroy (1980), J. Milroy (1992) and Chambers (1995) for much discussion and empirical evidence on the subtle forms of acquired linguistic knowledge and the richness of the systematic variation. 8. Truscott (1998a) makes a stab at integrating InstanceTheory into SLA. It is far too early to predict what effects this effort might have on the field. 9. Attempting to sort out the variation problem from the variability problem in UG theorising is not easy. Liceras (1988) wades through the conceptual confusions arising from the markedness literature, and the attempt to characterise the core grammar of a specific language, arising strictly from the constraints of UG, as opposed to the peripheral grammar of that same language, arising from making analogies, relaxing constraints of UG and learning. Unfortunately, this distinction, which could do some real work for SLA theorising, has virtually disappeared from public discussion. 10. Golinkoff (1999) makes the same point in connection with a discussion of how children learn the words of their first language. 11. On typological universals, see Greenberg (1966), Ferguson and Moravcsik (1978), Comrie (1981), Hawkins (1983, 1988a). 12. I might add here, as a syntactician trained in generative linguistics, that I find the general level of critical evaluation of new proposals in linguistic theory, made by SLA generativists, pretty low, much lower than that witnessed within grammatical theory itself. Grammarians demand that novel proposals explain at least as much data as the old theory; SLA theorists ought to do the same. 13. Optimality Theoretic approaches to universals, optionality, divergence and variation are in their infancy in SLA, see Sorace (in press), Hancin-Bhatt and Bhatt (1997). I will set aside any discussion of their relevance to the characterisation of universals and L2 acquisition. 14. Shifting the locus of variation to the “interfaces” between syntax and meaning or syntax and phonology, as is proposed in Minimalism does not dull this critique, for to the extent that parameter-setting must interact with, or even be dependent upon, concept or form learning, it ceases to be deterministic and tightly constrained. The problem of making UG compatible with induction becomes acute in such an approach. 15. I think this is not the appropriate definition of successful L2 learning which should, instead, be defined in terms of stimuli and input. 16. The Subset Principle is a principle formulated in L1 acquisition to ensure that learning can proceed on the basis of essentially normal speech to the child, without feedback and correction. Given analyses of input which could be generated by either of two grammars meeting the Subset Condition, the learner automatically adopts the most restrictive one. The Subset Condition thus holds whenever two grammars describe the same set of sentences but one of them (the superset grammar) will also describe additional sentences. Note that there is no evidence that the Subset Principle needs to hold in SLA since learners do learn linguistic information from feedback and correction (the negative evidence of Chapter 1). White (1989b: Ch. 6) re-interprets the Subset Principle as a principle holding of parameter-setting

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17. Although Archibald (1998: 66) has pointed out that parameter-resetting can only be understood in the context of a theory of cues appropriate to a parameter. Raising the trigger-problem tends to induce a lot of hand-waving in the direction of the first language acquisition literature, as if proposals from that domain can slip seamlessly into SLA. They don’t. For one example of appropriate research, see Liceras (1999). 18. This has obvious consequences for claims like those in Saleemi (1992) that there is a frequency threshold to be associated with parameter-setting. In the absence of a definition of cues or triggers, it is impossible to test such an hypothesis. 19. See Kail (1989), MacWhinney (1978), MacWhinney, Pléh, and Bates (1985), MacWhinney, (1989), and McDonald (1984, 1986, 1989). 20. Archibald’s adoption of the Dresher and Kaye (1990) trigger-based approach to parameter resetting of parameters relevant to stress is a case in point. Archibald merely assumes that the system can be taken over without change, meaning that the perception of stressed and unstressed syllables, rhythm, and “edges” of prosodic units has to occur independently of the learner’s L1 grammar in order for parameter-resetting to take place. But there is no reason to believe, and indeed good reason not to believe, that L2 learners perceive rhythm and stress independently of the L1 grammar, as Archibald (1994) has himself shown. If learners come to be able to perceive new patterns of stress, it is precisely because something else in the system has already been acquired. 21. One proposal, namely that the contents of the L1 grammar, including parameter-settings, is copied into the contents of the L2 “box” does not of itself deal with this issue since we still need to explain why the contents of the L2 box can restructure given a bit of data but the contents of the L1 box cannot. At the very least, we might need to assume that the learner’s learning is guided by some mental model of what language the stimuli belong to, but this would appear to tie parameter-resetting to metalinguistic knowledge in a way which no P&P theorist is likely to accept. 22. C-command is a relation operative across nodes in morphosyntactic representations which constrains a variety of relations holding of sentence structures and correspondences between conceptual representations and their syntactic instantiations. There are various versions of the relation, a common one is “A node x c-commands a node y iff x and y do not dominate one another and the first branching node dominating x also dominates y” (Reinhart 1976, 1983). The No Crossing Lines Constraint is a constraint holding of autosegmental representations in the phonology which requires tiers to be strictly linearly ordered relative to one another. Constituents on different tiers would not be strictly ordered if the association lines linking them were allowed to cross one another. See Kenstowicz (1994: 317). 23. Most of the experimental work done within the Competition Model has examined various cues for semantic role, in particular agentivity. Anyone hearing a sentence which contains a verb assigning Agent and Patient semantic roles will decide who did what to whom. How he goes about doing it is the processing question. What the Competition Model attempts to show is that language users vary in the kinds of information or cues they exploit since languages vary on such matters as constituent and phrase orders, case-marking, agreement, and so on. The observation is sound and the conclusion probably justified. However, we are not required to accept the Competition Model’s account of how this happens. The experiments done consistently say that various word orders are investigated; NVN, NNV and VNN are usually listed.

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However, in many of the experiments conducted, this description is inaccurate for subjects see or hear noun phrases. Now noun phrases have their own internal structure, and there is no reason to assume, indeed the typological literature suggests otherwise, that the internal structure of the noun phrase is completely independent of the internal structure of the clause, as the Competition Model researchers all apparently assume. I am suggesting, in other words, that anyone learning a language whose NP is head initial has a good cue that the VP order will also be head initial. Similar remarks can be made about the relationship between the internal structure of PPs or other major categories. There is no reason to assume that the only cues for how to relate noun phrases to verbs must be found in the order of nouns to verbs, or in the mappings between the possible semantic roles played by noun phrases and the semantic roles assigned by those verbs. This patterned relationship has received extensive discussion in a variety of grammatical theories, and indeed can be seen as the fundamental idea behind the X-bar theory of phrase structure (Jackendoff 1977), and some of the parameters of the P&P theory (Koopman 1984; Travis 1984, 1989). In ignoring the theoretical linguistic literature, the Competitors have deprived themselves of an important source of ideas about the nature of cues and their relationship to parsing decisions. Pye (1989: 129–30) makes the same point. 24. “Other critics have, in all sincerity, accused us of not believing in grammar at all! Of course we believe in grammar, and in grammatical diversity.” 25. The Competition Model has also been criticised for not being explicit about how stimuli become input to learning mechanisms, see Gibson (1992). 26. Talking of “isms” and “ists” obscures the finessing and adjustments which emerge from careful readings of research over the years. More specifically, we would need to infer that early White (White 1984, 1985a, b, 1986, 1987a) — but perhaps not later White (White 1989a, 1990/1991) — Suzanne Flynn (Flynn 1983, 1987, 1989a, b; Flynn and Espinal 1985), Hilles (1986) — but not Hilles (1991) — Marianne Phinney (Phinney 1987), Bonnie Schwartz (Schwartz 1992), Lakshmanan (1993/1994) — but not Lakshmanan (1989, 1994), and Margaret Thomas (1989, 1993) are all theists. Whether those who stand accused would admit their guilt is a separate matter. Other researchers who pursue a P&P agenda, e.g. Finer (1991), Eubank (1991, 1992) or Thomas (1995) are hard to classify in Gregg’s terms. 27. Including the idea that the construct itself is seriously flawed. See Grosjean (1985, 1989). Notice that the question of whether there is a critical period for the acquisition of specific features of grammars is a separate, although related, matter. 28. See also the critique in Epstein, Flynn, and Martohardjono (1996: 681) which focuses on the ways in which Bley-Vroman confounds representational and processing issues better kept apart. 29. Gregg (1996: 73) and Meisel (1991) make the same point. Gregg informs me (p.c., 1995) that it does not make the theist/deist debate meaningless. I disagree because I am convinced that when SLA P&P researchers actually take the trouble to define the object of their theory — UG — in psycholinguistic terms, i.e. in terms of the relation of the relevant constructs to speech perception, language processing, storage, retrieval, and language production, it will become apparent that principles and parameters are (i) not a representation put to use in a parsing system, (ii) not a mechanism of a learning device, and (iii) not a compiling process in a production system. If they are elements of a representational system which somehow informs the parser — and they are universal — then they can have no role to play in characterising change in the learner’s interlanguage, i.e. in characterising change from the particularities of one grammatical state to the particularities of another. 30. This is inaccurate since we now know that neonates can hear their mother’s voice before birth and have learned to distinguish at least some of its acoustic properties by birth.

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31. To simplify the presentation, I will assume that linguistic competence consists of a performance-independent mental grammar — a distinct “box” in the functional architecture of the mind. It would not matter much, however, if what we call “linguistic competence” were to consist of grammatical distinctions implicit in a variety of types of procedural knowledge lying behind our ability to parse speech, to produce it, to read and write text, to carry out metalinguistic tasks like putting an active sentence into the passive, to make acceptability judgements, and so on. See the discussion of the processing account of memory in Chapter 1. 32. I set aside here the “atheists”, the advocates of theories of acculturation (Schumann 1978), affective variables (Gardner 1985), variation (Ellis 1985; Tarone 1988), and discourse function (Hatch 1978a), who provide neither property nor transition theories, and therefore, cannot hope to offer us an explanatory language learning theory. See Gregg (1990, 1993, 1994b) for to-thepoint discussion. 33. See Meisel, Clahsen and Pienemann (1981), Clahsen, Meisel and Pienemann (1983), Clahsen, (1984, 1987, 1988), Clahsen and Muysken (1986, 1989), Meisel (1983, 1987, 1991, 1995), and Pienemann (1981). Note that O’Grady’s proposals, dubbed general nativism (O’Grady 1987, 1991, 1996) are explicitly not concerned with problem-solving, and hence cannot count as a “serious investigation” of the same. Since I will be examining evidence in Chapters 4 and 6 that language is not the only cognitive domain exhibiting autonomous properties, and hence discussing evidence against general nativism, I will not pursue it further. 34. To be fair to Clahsen, Meisel and Pienemann, it should be pointed out that their published proposals were based on research now 20 years old! All of them are aware of the limitations of these proposals in the light of subsequent research. Pienemann (1998a, b) has, moreover, recouched the findings of the earlier work in terms of his Processability Theory, a theory which deals exclusively with constraints on learner speech in production. Processability Theory is not incompatible with the hypothesis that mental grammars are encoded in representational systems specific to language and manifesting universal constraints. 35. While French is often claimed to have canonical SVO order, Charvillat and Kail (1991) discussed a number of studies which show that French speech, in particular the kind of speech used to and by young children, displays other orders due to the prevalence of left dislocations of the le petit châton, il regarde la souris ‘the+ little kitten, he looks-at the+ mouse’ type. The heavy use of dislocations is, of course, a property of discourse and not to be explained purely in terms of a theory of French sentence grammar. Charvillat and Kail also provided on-line data from a word monitoring task which show that subjects (both children and adults) disregard linear order when processing sentences involving NPs and clitic pronouns in dislocated sentences, meaning that the psycholinguistic status of word order in sentences with clitics and sentences without is quite different. 36. Another option is the tactic that DuPlessis, Solan, Travis and White (1987) take, which is to consider a variety of restructurings whose effects are not directly visible in the production data.

C 3 The representational and developmental problems of language acquisition

1.

Introduction

In Chapters 1 and 2, I made the claim that developing an explanatory theory of SLA will necessarily involve finding a way to link a theory of grammar to theories of perception, parsing and speech production and then to link the resulting product to a theory of language acquisition. I cited Kevin Gregg’s writings and talked about property and transition theories of language. A theory of grammar embedded in a theory of speech processing can provide us with a property theory of language. It defines the nature of linguistic distinctions, namely what the basic primitives of language are, and how those primitives are organised into more complex units and structures in individual psychogrammars. Just as importantly, a property theory spells out what representations cannot be. A property theory relevant for language acquisition will therefore specify the contents of representations of an I-language, by hypothesis what the speaker/ hearer cognises of her language. A property theory of language is thus needed to help us explain what Felix (1986: 82) calls the representational problem of language acquisition, which turns on questions like: What is the nature of the representational systems in which linguistic knowledge is encoded in the mature speaker/hearer? What are the limits of variation amongst the representations needed to account for knowledge of different languages? How do the representational systems in which language is encoded arise in the species? How are they like the representational systems of other faculties? In what respects are they unique? Also included will be questions like: What is the functional architecture of the language faculty? Given a specific representational system, what processes lead to the encoding of stimuli? How does intake become input to a specific language processor? How do representations of one type interact during processing with representations of another type?

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Notice that this is not your average characterisation of the representational problem of language. While discussion of it may begin with issues addressed exclusively by a theory of grammar, it should not end there. In other words, the property theory can and must be explored in at least two different descriptive modes — structural and process.1 As Jackendoff (1983, 1987) has emphasised, contemporary American psychology (and indeed this is also true of much psycholinguistic research) has investigated process at the expense of structure. I feel that the most recent research in SLA which takes its inspiration from the theory of grammar has emphasised structure over process, as if a theory of grammatical description could substitute for a theory of language processing.2 Structure and process are inseparable in language acquisition, but they are distinct ways of thinking about language and we need to find a coherent way of linking them while preserving their distinctiveness. One way to do this is to integrate mental grammars into a language processing framework in such a way that the processes are defined as operations which build mental representations, some of which are categories, some of which are structures. One of the advantages of classic symbolic approaches to processing is that they allow us to define the distinctions language users make in both categorial and structural terms and to define learning as the process of coming to encode the relevant distinctions (see Carroll 1989, for discussion). Thus, if a learner does not cognise either gender subclasses or embedded clauses, meaning that she cannot parse or spontaneously produce them in her own speech, we interpret this to mean that she cannot represent the relevant gender categories or the relevant structures for embedded clauses. Learning gender subclasses would mean then cognising a formal distinction among the subclasses of nouns and learning to identify the cues which signal inclusion in one subclass or another. Learning embedding would mean either learning the operations needed to build sentential complements (if we have reason to think that they are altogether absent from the interlanguage grammar), or learning to apply extant operations to encode representations in just the way demanded by the input.3 Consider another example. We noted in Chapter 2 that it has often been argued that early interlanguage grammars have paratactic organisation. One way to interpret such a claim is to assume that learners initially construct “flat” representations of utterances, as in (3.1a). Learning appropriate grammatical structures would mean that the learner constructs “deeper” constructions, as in (3.1b). The structure in (3.1b) represents a minimal expansion of the paratactic organisation of (3.1a); adopting a theory of syntax which motivates richer phrasal structure might justify imputing a more complex representation of the utterance Me be British.

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paratactic organisation4 E NP

NP

N

N

me British syntactic organisation5 E NP N

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British

In this book, talk of process should be construed as talk about what happens when language parsing and production mechanisms construct mental representations which are, in effect, categorial and structural objects. Once this step is made, it becomes possible to ask how language acquisition mechanisms could come to encode the specific processes which build structures and create their constituent parts. Given this perspective, it becomes possible to explain why an adequate theory of SLA must be grounded in a property theory of language adopting structural constructs provided by UG, and including the basic notion of autonomous levels of representation. Language acquisition simply is the encoding of the relevant categorial and structural distinctions in the appropriate representational “language.” Nevertheless, and despite my interest in focusing on language processing and its connection to a theory of acquisition, I feel obliged to begin with a more thorough discussion of representational matters. In Chapters 3 and 4, I therefore intend to examine in some detail how we might conceptualise acquisition in representational terms. This is necessary in order to tease apart, first of all, issues related to innateness and maturation (and hence to Universal Grammar) from those related to induction and instance-based learning and, ultimately, to positive evidence, correction, feedback and other environmentally determined influences

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on learning. I shall argue in this chapter that if UG is construed as a set of potentialities available to children in the absence of exposure to linguistic stimuli, then UG cannot be “accessed” by older learners (child or adult). As noted in Chapter 2, UG is simply not encoded in longterm memory and therefore cannot be “accessed” by any group of learners. The “accessing” metaphor misrepresents in a fundamental way the hypothesis that UG is innate. A focus on representation is also necessary to broach the topic of what initiates learning. In Chapter 1, I stated that language acquisition is “input driven” in the sense that learning mechanisms are triggered when parsing of an input fails. Parsing will fail when the parser does not include a parsing procedure capable of analysing an input datum. Correcting a parse fail will mean constructing a new procedure capable of encoding a novel representation. But this hypothesis requires that we distinguish carefully between processes of encoding on the parsing and production sides of performance. In addition, we will have to distinguish between on-line restructurings and off-line reorganisations or consolidations of representations in longterm memory. On-line restructurings can be assumed to be input driven while the reorganisations described in Chapter 1 as representational redescription appear to have some other source whose operations are little understood. Finally, we must distinguish between grammar restructuring and the strengthening of encodings which makes accessing representations faster and more reliable. I might hear and represent both Vórtrag (with stress on the first syllable) and Vertrág (with stress on the second) and understand from the context, or because someone has told me, that the former expresses the idea of a talk or a colloquium or a public presentation while the latter denotes a contract. I might also be able to systematically discriminate between them when someone else uses them, but still activate both and hesitate between them whenever I myself want to ask my secretary to prepare a contract for a student: Is the right form Vórtrag or Vertrág, Vortrág or Vértrag; Which form should I say? Activation-based models of memory permit us to characterise such phenomena. Finally, we need clarification in order to make sense of current debates about the role of UG in SLA, as opposed to association-based models like the Competition Model or problemsolving type approaches like those suggested by Clahsen and Muysken (1986) or Schachter (1992). At this point in the discussion, it is appropriate to return to the contributions of various acquisition theories to the issues at hand. Recall from the discussion in Chapter 2 that Gregg makes the point that many of the past or current proposals in the SLA literature, which have been drawn largely from developmental and social psychology, fail to constitute even an approximation to an explanatory theory of second language acquisition. This judgement, while a harsh

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one, strikes me as being correct. McLaughlin (1987), Ellis (1990), LarsenFreeman and Long (1991), Towell and Hawkins (1994), and Meisel (in preparation) all provide detailed reviews of the SLA literature. These reviews reveal that few of the various proposals provide answers to the representational problem of how learners could come to have encoding systems with the properties needed to instantiate grammatical knowledge. Indeed, few of them recognise it as a central issue (hence Gregg’s critique). Past and current proposals fall far short of explanation of how learners learn because most of them fail to specify with any precision what learners learn. In the absence of a treatment of the contents of knowledge, it is hardly surprising that the literature also fails to address the problem of how learners learn on the basis of the actual stimuli that they hear or read. In contrast, P&P theory, insofar as it offers a complete and explicit theory of grammar, meets the requirement of defining what language structures are.6 A theory of what it means to be a human language can be seen as setting the outer boundaries on a theory of language learning. A consideration of the representational problem of language acquisition alone forces us to turn our back on most of what passes in SLA as acquisition theory. But there are other reasons to be interested in P&P theory. Explicitness as to what is being represented permits explicitness about language processing. It is possible in principle to integrate some version of P&P theory into models of processing (both parsing and production). Principle-based parsing theories exist (Pritchett 1992; Gorrell 1995) and are beginning to be explored in SLA by Juffs (1998a, b) who has examined such issues as the divergence of grammatical competence and parsing abilities in very advanced L2 speaker/hearers. Taken together, P&P theory and principle-based parsing theories give us a rich picture of the human language representational capacity. Now let us look at acquisition in developmental terms. We have said we need a transition theory, which will explain how and why grammars restructure. Transition theories are designed to explain the developmental problem of language acquisition (Felix 1986: 82). Research questions related to the developmental problem are: How do representations change over time from some initial stage to the final steady state? What initiates the restructuring of a representation? Are developmental changes local or global? Why does restructuring stop? Is the representational system subject to stimulus-independent processes of integration and reorganisation, or is developmental change always dependent upon the processing of stimuli and/or input? Related to this last question are the additional questions: Must learning be driven by errors? Does it respond to negative evidence? P&P theory offers interesting ideas to some of these questions, in particular, the hypothesis that a small change in one part of the grammar can have broad-ranging consequences in other, seemingly unrelated parts. P&P theory

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also offers a principled basis for restructuring insofar as it requires a theory of triggers, the latter being the necessary input to the learning mechanisms which will inform the learner how a given parameter is to be set. But here we begin to see the gap between the promise of the P&P theory and the focus of SLA research. Triggering in SLA has been broached (although not solved) in the context of accent systems in SLA research adopting generative phonology (Archibald 1991, 1993, 1994, 1999). Archibald follows Dresher and Kaye (1990) and Dresher (1999) in assuming that a theory of parameters must include a theory of triggers. UG, in other words, must provide the learner with information as to what a possible trigger can be. Whether it is conceptually plausible or even possible to stipulate triggers for morphosyntactic parameters like the null subject parameter (or pro-drop parameter) or the verb raising parameter across a range of languages and language types is far from obvious. I will provide an argument below that it cannot be the case that UG provides an independent list of triggers for verb raising. In general, the subject of triggers has been largely ignored in the SLA literature, meaning that a major research effort is required if the P&P theory, as a theory of development, is ever to be more than a “promissory note.” Nevertheless, it is possible to map out a research strategy for an SLA theory which takes P&P as its core. Seen in this light, the SLA P&P research of the last 15 years might be seen as laying the foundation for the creation of a transition theory of language development. If so, the appropriate question would then be: Where do we go from here? We have seen that one of the primary arguments against P&P theory in SLA arises from the fact that at least some researchers appear to have been misled by the dynamic metaphor of “switch-setting” and treat UG as if it were an acquisition mechanism directly involved in the construction of mental representations. While I want to argue that categories, structures and mental representations are psychologically real in the relevant sense, I want to deny that parameters are. Parameters cannot be representations in a psychogrammar which are “accessed” by learning mechanisms. But supposing that we correct this fundamental misinterpretation of P&P theory, one might then ask: If P&P theory offers so much promise, surely the sensible research strategy would be to adopt it and fix the problems, would it not? We gain nothing by adopting the vague views of language prevalent in so much of the SLA literature. While the logic expressed is impeccable, my answer is “No”, for the simple reason that I do not believe that P&P theory can be fixed. My reasons for this were partly stated in Chapter 2 and will become clearer as we proceed through Chapter 3. But first we need to see what the central characteristics of the P&P theory are. In the next section, I sketch out what I take them to be.

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Principles and parameters theory (P&P)

2.1 P&P theory: the core ideas Generative theories come in many forms — the Principles and Parameters theory (Chomsky 1981b, 1986, 1988, 1991a, b; Chomsky and Lasnik 1995) and its most recent offshoot Minimalism (Chomsky 1991c, 1994, 1995), Lexical Functional Grammar (Bresnan 1978, 1982; Kaplan and Bresnan 1982), Generalised Phrase Structure Grammar (Gazdar, Klein, Pullum, and Sag 1985) and its avatar Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, or Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolenski 1993; McCarthy and Prince 1995; Grimshaw 1997). They are all part of the “generative enterprise” insofar as they attempt to model linguistic cognition against a backdrop of presumed linguistic universals. All of them meet the requirement of providing formal definitions of language, and, therefore, could underpin acquisition studies. To date, however, with the exception of work by Manfred Pienemann (1998a, b), almost all generative SLA research has been couched in the P&P theory.7 Its impact in the area of SLA morphosyntax in particular has been decisive. This is so even though the research agenda of P&P theory raises some rather odd problems for acquisition theory.8 Why should P&P theory been adopted so readily in SLA? What is the nature of its appeal? The P&P framework consists of a number of core ideas. The most important is that linguistic cognition arises out of the interplay of linguistic stimuli and a species-specific cognitive faculty whose essential properties are biologically given. The language faculty consists of an innate knowledge system, called Universal Grammar, and an innate language acquisition device, or LAD, whose operations are somehow constrained in such a way as to respect UG.9 UG is that knowledge of language which humans possess in the absence of exposure to speech. It constitutes therefore the initial state of linguistic knowledge which the infant brings to the task of learning the first language. Knowledge of the L1, described as constituting the final state of the speaker/hearer, can be characterised as arising as a by-product of UG in interaction with the environment. The second central idea is that UG makes available for the construction of individual grammars neither rules, as they are normally understood, nor constructions like questions or the passive. Rule-learning has been rejected since it seems to rely on a mechanism of hypothesis-formation and hypothesis-testing. The former is viewed as too unconstrained and the latter as computationally too costly. Constructions are viewed as an epiphenomenon and this claim provides the essential insight into the P&P approach to language-specific generalisations — they arise from the operation of sets of abstract universal principles and

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parameters, the latter being a set of options as to how the universals should apply (Chomsky 1995: 6). A third central idea is that problems of language variation and language typology can be characterised as the differential setting of the parameters provided by UG. If one assumes that the variation among the grammars described by typologists arises as a result of first language acquisition processes, those processes can then be construed as the selection of specific parameter settings in conjunction with learned properties of specific lexical items (Chomsky 1995: 6–7). A fourth idea is that the principles of UG exhibit certain sorts of commonalities. On the one hand, there are principles which are relevant to the characterisation of sentence derivations, namely transformations and the conditions on their operation, as well as the licensing conditions on representations. Licensing conditions include such properties as that nouns must be assigned abstract case, or that a verb must be assigned a tense feature. On the other hand, principles are organised in terms of distinct subsystems, called modules, dealing with subparts of the grammar, e.g. binding theory, case theory, θ-theory etc. (Chomsky and Lasnik 1995: 27). This distinction is necessitated by the fact that these modules or subparts of the grammar may or may not operate within a single level of representation. In P&P theory, in addition to a level of sound representation called PF (for phonetic form), a grammar also contains a level of morphosyntactic representation, with three distinct sublevels — D-structure (which reflects directly the argument structure of expressions drawn from the lexicon), S-structure (which feeds PF and organises the linear order of expressions), and LF (for logical form) which presents the conceptual system with a disambiguated syntactic structure for the purposes of characterising scope phenomena and other syntactically determined types of ambiguity. See Chomsky and Lasnik (1995).10 What exactly is the form of UG? This is the sixty thousand dollar question and we all wish we knew the answer. Stating with any confidence any particular claim from the perspective of the theory of grammar is difficult, especially at the moment, insofar as the various ideas which were commonplace in the 1980s have been modified dramatically in the early 1990s and then even rejected completely as P&P theory has merged into Minimalism, on the one hand, and Optimality Theory, on the other. I will limit myself to those ideas which have had an influence on SLA thinking, which means basically focusing on ideas prevalent in the 1980s and early 1990s. I will divide the discussion into two parts, looking first at substantive universals and then at formal universals.

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2.2 Universal Grammar: substantive universals Substantive universals are those features from which the basic constituents and classes of a language must be drawn. This featural vocabulary instantiates speech sounds and the atomic units and phrases of the morphosyntax. In Chapter 1, in a discussion of how transducers feed input to phonological processors, I spoke of features, segments (consonants and vowels) and CV syllables. These are essential units or forms of the sound system (the phonology of a language). A theory of grammar must provide a basic vocabulary from which the sound system of any language is constructed. It is therefore assumed that UG provides a set of primitive phonetic features which capture both acoustic and articulatory aspects of speech perception and speech production. The language specific repertoire of segments and prosodic units of a given language (morae, syllables, feet, prosodic words, etc.) will be constructed from this set of primitives.11 The basic typology of prosodic units is also provided by UG. As for morphosyntactic representations, they consist of lexical categories (like noun, verb, adjective, or particle — covering both prepositions and postpositions) and functional categories (like tense, aspect, number, case, etc.). By hypothesis, it is assumed that lexical and functional categories are derived from primitive morphosyntactic features. The basic categorial features [±N, ±V] are cited in the relevant literature but a richer typology must be available in order to formally distinguish the numerous word classes of most languages.12 The basic atomic units of the sentence combine in various ways to form phrasal categories. It is assumed that the combinations instantiate function-argument pairs with the features of the functors either selecting or licensing lexical categories and/or their projections. Selection is usually discussed in terms of idiosyncratic relations between pairs of units, as when the transitive verb paint semantically and categorially selects an NP and an AdjP in sentences like Jessica painted her face green. Licensing is hypothesised to be a general relationship regulating the occurrence of specific categories and features, for example, as when wh-words are said to be licensed in Spec of CP by a wh-feature in Comp under Spec-Head agreement. UG also requires that phrasal categories include a lexical head and that complements and specifiers be attached to heads in such a way that the scope of specifiers be structurally determined and complements and heads form “local domains.” Finally, UG provides for certain correspondences between the morphosyntax and conceptual structures. Derived phrasal categories are put into correspondence with referential categories. Thus noun phrases will typically express individuals or THINGS, while verb phrases will typically express ACTIONS and adjective phrases often express PROPERTIES (see Jackendoff 1983). Categorial selection

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has been argued to derive from semantic selection (Pesetsky 1982). Not all features, categories or classes are, however, instantiated in the grammar of every language. The interpretation of the universality of UG moreover does not require this. Rather, the substantive universals are usually viewed as potential elements of a language — a language learner must choose from the set provided but need not choose everything. In this respect Universal Grammar is more like dim sum than a menu fixe. It constrains the set of offerings but does not impose a specific choice on every learner. It is usually hypothesised that UG provides a full set of basic features and that children somehow recognise which ones are needed in their particular L1, based on the stimuli available, using the stimuli to derive input which in turn are used to construct the relevant L1 categories. Thus, children learning Polynesian languages will construct V and CV syllables based on the shape of the words they hear, while children learning French will construct V, CV, VC, CVC, CCV, VCC, and CVCC syllables, again based on the shapes of the phonological words constituting input to the learning mechanisms. Similarly, children learning English will learn to construct sentences containing V NP NP frames, where the NPs are morphologically indistinguishable, presumably on the basis of stimuli like Give me that glass. Children learning Finnish do not since NPs in Finnish must be morphologically case-marked. Now at precisely this point, the discussion in the theory of grammar literature tends to end, since the specification of the basic repertoire of primitives and a categorial typology appears to exhaust the representational problem. Discussion within the theory of grammar thus leaves entirely unanswered the developmental question: How does the child construct the appropriate categories of the L1? This is a complex issue as yet little understood. Moreover, it is a topic about which P&P theorists have said very little. The logic of P&P theory as a theory of linguistic development would appear to require that children know how to construct the categories of their language in the absence of input or on the basis of minimal bits of evidence. Certainly there are good reasons to suppose that in specific cases children are indeed inevitably drawn to avoid particular types of category-building although the resulting categories might be logically possible. As is well-known, there are constraints on how phonetic features can combine to form segments, for example, a vowel cannot be simultaneously [+high, +low] because the tongue cannot simultaneously be below and above neutral position in the mouth. Such constraints are functional and arise from the nature of human anatomy. Others, such as the fact that highly resonant segments constitute the nucleus of a syllable while less resonant segments occupy slots on the edges appear to arise from general properties of perception

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which requires maxima and minima of sonority to encode sequences of units. Such constraints do not require the postulation of parameters. Consequently, although languages vary according to the number and types of categories they make use of and there are important restrictions on how categories can combine, the typology of categories has not lent itself as yet to the development of an explicit theory of parameters with deductive consequences for phonetics and phonology.13 Similar remarks can be made about the typology of morphosyntactic categories. To my knowledge, no one has proposed a set of parameters to explain why English speakers distinguish auxiliaries, modals and verbs or transitive and intransitive prepositions alongside particles. Such categories exist simply because the facts of the language require that we postulate them. Now it is at precisely this point that we stub our toes on some of the more extreme statements to emerge from the P&P literature. The question of how the languagespecific categories of a language are to be constructed within a theory which tolerates no talk of rule-learning, constructions, pattern learning, induction, association and so on, remains unaddressed let alone resolved. Category construction does get discussed in the L1 acquisition literature in relation to the various bootstrapping hypotheses which are designed to explain essentially how a learner might be led to construct morphosyntactic categories on the basis of prior knowledge of categories at other levels of representation. We find in this literature the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis (Grimshaw 1981; Gleitman and Wanner 1982; Macnamara 1982; Pinker 1984, 1987; Gleitman, Gleitman, Landau and Wanner 1988), the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis (Gleitman 1990), and the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis (Gleitman and Wanner 1982; Morgan 1986; Morgan, Meier and Newport 1987; Morgan and Demuth 1996). In all cases, the argument is that learners are driven by a priori tendencies or predispositions to map categories of one level of representation onto categories of another level of representation. The alternative to encoding categories in this fashion involves learning distributional cues to category location and inducing the categories from such distributional cues (Braine 1963, 1966, 1987). Bootstrapping is thus seen to be part of the solution to the developmental problem of language, a factor in a theory of language acquisition which is designed to eliminate a certain amount of induction. The logic of the bootstrapping literature is straightforward: If the theory of grammar does not constrain the nature of category acquisition, then the theory of acquisition must do so. There is a lively debate going on in the L1 literature as to the exact nature of initial correspondences in L1 acquisition. The semantic bootstrapping hypothesis amounts to the claim that children are guided to the discovery of lexical

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categories by a correspondence operation which maps basic and universally available conceptual categories onto morphosyntactic features. Such a correspondence operation might be expressed explicitly as something like: “If a word expresses a THING concept, then it is a [+N, −V] category.” We might construe these initial correspondences as either learning procedures (that is to say, as something performed by the learning mechanisms) or as speech processing procedures (that is to say, as something performed by a parser and by a speech production mechanism). If we hypothesise that this is a learning procedure, then we will assume that the learning mechanisms are accessing pre-established semantic categories and a set of extant morphosyntactic features to construct an initial lexicon. Note that this interpretation of learning is inconsistent with a modular view of learning like that proposed by Schwartz and discussed in Chapter 1. It need not, however, be incompatiable with a modular view of speech processing. If, in contrast, we interpret these initial correspondences as primitive parsing and production procedures then we might be forced to assume that sentence parsers are initially interactive, resorting to semantic categories expressed in Conceptual Structures in order to assign a formal classification to a phonological form. In any event, at the very least we can assert that the semantic category, the morphosyntactic features and the correspondence rule must all be in place (either innate or acquired) before the child can acquire any forms of the word class noun, if the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis is correct. Moreover, it is also assumed that children construct the repertoire of categories conservatively, meaning that they tend to map quite specific semantic categories onto lexical types and generalise across types slowly (see Pinker 1989; and Bowerman 1987). Gleitman (1990) has, however, countered that children acquire concepts at the same time that they are acquiring grammatical classes creating a logical problem with respect to the order of acquisition. How can children acquire lexical classes based on semantic classes if they have not yet acquired the semantic categories? She also suggests that specific semantic subclasses have to be acquired on the basis of a mapping from distributional properties of words in sentences. Rather than working from concepts to word classes, the child appears to be working from syntactic frames to semantic fields. Verbs belonging to specific semantic fields tend to occur in the same syntactic frame. Thus, verbs expressing MOTION in English tend to occur in frames of the NP V (PP) (PP) sort, e.g. The scent of matthiola blew from one end of the garden to the other while verbs expressing CAUSATION tend to occur in frames of the NP V NP VP sort, e.g. The insecticidal soap made the thrips disappear. Gleitman has argued that a child who can identify such frames has learned a vital cue to the semantic classification of new words. To learn concepts in this way, learners would have

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to be sensitive to the location of specific forms in syntactic strings and to the semantic field of at least some verbs occurring in them. Hearing a novel form in a known frame would involve assigning the form to the relevant semantic field and then attempting to figure out the specific semantic properties of the word. In the case of a child hearing something like The toy soldier zipped from one end of the field to the other, we can hypothesise that the child would assign zipped to the class of verbs of motion and be driven to distinguish it from all others in terms of the feature MANNER OF MOTION since most verbs of motion are distinguished in terms of this feature. In the case of a child hearing a novel syntactic frame, we must assume that the child would be driven not to assign it to the class of verbs of MOTION but rather to project a novel semantic subclass, following a “Difference in syntactic frame means a difference in meaning” learning strategy. To the best of my knowledge, the developmental sequencing of semantic and syntactic bootstrapping has not been worked out and the specific contribution of each to early development remains unclear. As for prosodic bootstrapping, Morgan (1986) has argued that prosodic patterning provides the learner with an initial segmentation of the stimuli which can simplify the acquisition of morphosyntactic properties by grouping forms together prosodically which belong together syntactically. Kelly (1988a, b, 1989, 1992) and Cassidy and Kelly (1991) have gone far beyond a prosodic “packaging” argument to hypothesise that there are important differences in prominence patterns among the morphosyntactic classes of English which a child could use to learn those classes. Thus, the major lexical classes (noun, verb, adjective, particle) bear prominence while the exponents of the various functional categories on the whole do not.14 A child who had figured out that some functional categories are stressless might then be predisposed to assign novel stressless syllables to extant functional categories and not to the major lexical classes, while assigning novel stressed syllables to the extant lexical classes and not to a functional category. Other potentially useful prosodic cues include the fact that the typical prominence patterns of nouns and verbs differ, with two-syllable nouns typically showing prominence on the first syllable (in accordance with the stress patterns of the Germanic foot) while two-syllable verbs typically show prominence on the second syllable (in accordance with the stress patterns of the “Romance” vocabulary of English). Adults are also sensitive to the relevant patterns and can identify them in nonce forms (Kelly 1988a, b). In both cases, for learning to take place on the basis of prosodic bootstrapping, children would initially have to be capable of analysing the acoustic speech stream in terms of syllables and patterns of syllable prominence, and use variations in such patterns to mark off the edges of prosodic words. They would then have to be driven to

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map these different prosodic patterns onto distinct morphosyntactic classes, following a basic learning strategy: “Difference in prosodic prominence equals difference in morphosyntactic class.” The representation of syllables and syllable prominence would obviously have to have been acquired at an earlier stage of acquisition, before word classes are encoded, to be used to guide the learner into the morphosyntactic representations. Spelt out in such detail, the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis raises some obvious problems, namely, why children should be driven to map prominence differences onto different morphosyntactic classes but not differences in fundamental frequency, syllable structure, vowel lengthening or any other arbitrary prosodic distinction. Note that children learning Chinese and other tone languages must be willing to map different tones onto different word classes, so why don’t children learning English do the same? The only response possible would appear to be that there is massive counterevidence available in the stimuli provided to English-learning infants, but such a response would require empirical investigation. The same analyses of the speech to children would also have to demonstrate that all of the other possible prosodic distinctions which might be bootstrapped onto morphosyntactic classes are also contradicted by the input to learning mechanisms. At the moment, rather than constraining learning mechanisms, the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis would appear to increase the number of options that they must compute. At most it can be argued that the computation takes place at one level of analysis “lower down”, that is to say, in the phonology, and that once learning takes place there, then what has been acquired can assist learning at the morphosyntactic level. Gerken, Landau and Remez (1990) and Gerken (1996) have, however, countered that children do not need to wait on the emergence of their prosodic representations to begin to learn lexical categories. Their counteranalysis is similar to that of Gleitman’s critique of semantic bootstrapping in that they claim that children show a precocious ability to do morphosyntactic distributional analysis, thus demonstrating that children can encode morphosyntactic classes and patterns right from the very start of the syntactic stages of linguistic development. In short, morphosyntactic development proceeds at the same time as prosodic development and does not appear to be developmentally dependent on it. One can attempt to cut through the L1 developmental debates, which at the moment are inconclusive, by focusing on their logic. The various appeals to bootstrapping predispositions are an attempt to define a priori cues to morphosyntactic classes based on the hypothesis that the child encodes semantic or prosodic categories first. The a priori correspondences between prosodic categories and morphosyntactic ones or between semantic categories and morpho-

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syntactic ones eliminate the need for the child to induce all morphosyntactic categories by computing morphosyntactic distributional cues. The counterarguments appear to be based in part on the empirical observation that the child has precocious knowledge of the morphosyntax at the time when she is attempting to produce speech. At the very least it would appear that young children during first language acquisition are simultaneously sensitive to the basic primitives of the various levels of analysis (minimally phonetic, phonological, morphosyntactic and semantic) and are capable of representing cues to categories and establishing correspondences across the levels very rapidly. This suggests that children are indeed driven to characterise the stimuli they get in terms of the types of categories made available by UG and by a universal semantics and that they may have established many of the necessary morphosyntactic distinctions before they begin to produce 2- or 3-word utterances. However the debates as to semantic and prosodic bootstrapping are resolved, we need only keep in mind that the various proposals rely on the existence of detectable cues for a particular morphosyntactic analysis, cues which are not properties of the speech stream. Rather, they are properties of analysed representations intermediate between transduced stimuli and conceptual representations. They emerge from the construction and analysis of prosodic categories like syllable and feet (or prosodic words) or from the construction and analysis of conceptual categories. They may operate from the bottom-up or from the top-down but in either case they are abstract mental constructs. Beyond that, given the considerable crosslinguistic variation we find in category types, it would appear to be necessary to assume that cue learning relevant for category construction is guided by the validity, and conflict validity of cues in much the way the Competitors say it is, once it is granted that cues are part of mental representations constructed by parsing procedures.15 Now let us consider the problem of category learning in SLA. L2 research presents a striking contrast to the L1 literature in that category learning has not been treated as a central problem for the theory to explain. Rather the idea of bootstrapping has been largely ignored and the topic of a priori mapping correspondences tends to get subsumed by the transfer literature. In other words, if the learner were automatically and necessarily mapping categories of the L1 onto the phonetic forms of the L2, as, for example, the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis of Schwartz and Sprouse (1994, 1996) claim, then there would be nothing else to say about bootstrapping. Whatever may be the value of the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis, it does not constitute a theory of category formation. On the assumption that L2 learners are capable of learning novel syllable types, novel morphosyntactic frames or novel patterns of word structure

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(an assumption which hardly seems farfetched), we require a theory which says how they do it. I know of no relevant research studies in SLA which address the issue of how categories are formed in the context of constraints imposed by UG, although there is research on category formation done within other approaches to which I return shortly. The view adopted here is that category formation is one area where grammar-learning exhibits properties shared with other cognitive domains. Linguistic categories are prototypes and exhibit family-resemblances, meaning that categories are formed from exemplars which resemble one another more than they resemble members of other categories. Categories are not constructed on the basis of necessary or sufficient conditions of membership. In every category there are core instances which are easy to classify as well as peripheral instances where we cannot decide (Jackendoff 1983; Taylor 1989, 1994). Just as we may feel that an apple is a “good” exemplar of the category FRUIT so we may feel that a word referring to an animate agentive countable individual is a better exemplar of the category noun than the expression there. Compare sentences like Jessica danced around the livingroom versus There is someone dancing around the livingroom. We may not hesitate to classify the expression Jessica as an instance of the category noun and resist classifying there as a member of the same category despite its position before the verb. Similarly, vowels make better syllable nuclei than nasals which make better syllable nuclei than fricative and stop consonants. Attempting to construct parameters for stating how languages select among the set of categories derivable from the basic set of formal primitives is probably not the right tactic since it presupposes that linguistic categories are unique in all respects. In addition, P&P theory does a terrible job of characterising the prototypical properties of language. Perhaps Optimality Theory is the proper way to formalise the above-mentioned observations since it allows characterisations drawn from the theory of formal description to conflict. My own approach, however, is to ask what we can learn from the research in the Competition Model and other research focusing on cue-based learning in our attempts to understand category learning. Such research asks us to focus on the information which tells a learner where a category is to be found. The Competition Model hypothesises that learners are actively scanning the stimuli for constant or recurrent properties. The learning mechanism detects the co-variation of properties in the stimulus (contingencies among stimulus events). The most reliable and available of detectable properties in the stimuli can, via association, become cues for classes (Bates and MacWhinney 1989; McDonald 1989). Suppose we were to adapt these ideas to a theory rooted in a universalist framework. In the UG-based model proposed here, the assumption is that the

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learning mechanism scans stimuli and other forms of input, guided by the features made available by UG for encodings of information in specific representational systems. I specifically hypothesise that UG is expressed in the language acquisition device in such a way that the transducers must take in certain features. At each subsequent level of autonomous analysis, the learning mechanisms will have at their disposition only certain representational primitives for encoding linguistic constituents. The learning mechanisms will induce certain classes, using information from a lower level down, from a higher level up (including conceptual information) and from distributional patterns at the same level of analysis. Learning syntactic word classes must, under this view, begin in some a priori capacity to identify a phonological form or a concept as a likely exponent of a given morphosyntactic feature or feature bundle. Accordingly, I adopt the hypothesis that in first language acquisition, there are initial correspondence operations (the bootstrapping hypotheses discussed above), identifying categories across levels of analysis. Subsequently, the learning mechanisms must locate and label categories based on level-internal information.16 What are the implications of this for SLA? Given the prevalence of transfer, we cannot assume that learners bring a priori correspondence strategies of the sorts seen in first language acquisition. Despite much talk that “L1 = L2” in all its essentials (Dulay, Burt and Krashen 1982), we do not find adult L2 learners initially exhibiting N = ACTOR or V = ACTION correspondences. From the earliest stages, adults understand nouns which express other semantic roles, such as EXPERIENCER, and they can express them too (see Klein and Perdue 1992). Nor do we find learners of English restricted initially to using nouns with a monosyllabic or bisyllabic pattern with stress on the first syllable. Indeed, it is well known that the kinds of phonological simplifications exhibited in child speech (with words consisting of either one or two CV syllables) are not found in adult L2 interlanguage. Adults acquire words with various prosodic characteristics based either on the frequency of the forms in the stimuli or on their utility to the learner. Afterall, if the form you need is Würstchen (‘sausage’), then Würstchen it will have to be, even if L1 CV-syllable structures impose vowel epenthesis on the learner struggling to articulate it. Is the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis (FT/FA) the right way to conceptualise transfer? I think not, given that the FT/FA Hypothesis is defined over the interlanguage grammar and appears to be largely concerned with interlanguage production. On its own the FT/FA may describe the fact of transfer but the theory in which it is embedded provides no account for the acquisition of new categories and indeed the hypothesis itself raises the question: How could learners acquire the L2? I think the Schwartz and Sprouse approach misanalyses

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the problem of transfer. In the Autonomous Induction Theory, transfer is conceptualised in terms of the transfer of parsing and production procedures. In the case of speech analysis, the parsers are assumed to be tuned to cues defined for rapid processing of the L1. This means that they will be sensitive to L1-specific cues and especially sensitive to cues which are highly informative. They will also ignore or filter out cues uniquely relevant to the classification of the categories of the L2. In Chapter 1, I mentioned the work of James Emil Flege and his collaborators who have been exploring the issue of segment perception, recognition and the acquisition of novel categories in an L2 phonology (see, in addition to the works cited in Chapter 1, Flege 1987, 1993; Flege and Eefting 1986, 1987, 1988). They demonstrate quite clearly that “matching models” of perception are inadequate to explain speech perception because L2 learners are capable of assimilating distinct acoustic information in the signal to the segmental categories of the L1 phonology. Indeed, Flege has used this fact to argue that exemplars of the L2 drawn from phonetic categories similar to those of the L1 are harder to “hear” as distinct sounds than exemplars belonging to quite different categories. These, it seems, are easy to “hear” as distinct sounds of the L2. Kuhl and Iverson (1995) have developed a theory of perception called the Native Language Magnet Theory which can account for Flege’s findings. According to this theory, segmental perception is organised around sound categoriesas-prototypes. Discriminating among sounds located near the central tendency is difficult but improves as stimuli move further away in the perceptual “space.” This research raises the difficult problem of specifying what counts for learners as “the same thing” and what counts as “different things”, a problem shared, by the way, with other domains of cognitive psychology. Indeed, the existence of equivalence classification in speech perception raises the problem of how L2 segmental learning could take place at all (Flege 1987). If it turns out to be a major phenomenon in SLA, operating, for example, at all levels of representation via the lexicon, then how do learners learn any aspect of the second language? As the literature on cognate recognition shows, this troubling question can indeed be raised with respect to lexical items (Carroll 1992; Pal 1999, 2000).17 Cue-based approaches to category formation offer a way out insofar as cues can conflict and differ in their validity. I think we have to assume that steady exposure to L2 stimuli will involve varying exposure to the various cues to a category. As the presence of different configurations of cues shift, the possibility of novel resolutions to cue conflict will arise. Thus, a cue which will reliably predict in English the presence of a voiceless stop in syllable-initial position, e.g. long-lag VOT, will not be present in Spanish L2 stimuli. Other cues will be present and the learning mechanism must learn over time which are the most

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reliable and valid. In other words, to the extent that category classification depends on the availability of stable and unchanging configurations of cues, then category membership can be viewed as stable and unchanging. But if the cue configuration can change, and in SLA it clearly does, then category membership can change. When category membership changes, by definition, so do the boundaries of the category. Another issue relates to the question of whether learners can be sensitive to cue types which are not relevant to the processing of the L1, presumably a sine qua non for L2 learning to begin. I have been exploring this issue in the context of the acquisition of gender attribution (part of the acquisition of the noun category in French, see Carroll 1989). I assume that correspondence operations, like all parsing and production procedures, transfer automatically at the initial stage of L2 learning. Lexical items in Jackendoff’s theory of language are defined as correspondences across the different autonomous levels of representation. Not surprisingly, then, we predict that L2 learners will initially transfer automatically the lexically-stipulated correspondences of their first language vocabulary. There is considerable support for this idea in the transfer literature, although Kellerman (1978, 1986, 1987) has shown that learners can quickly form ideas about what will not transfer from the L1. In the case of learners of an L2 with gender whose L1 also has gender, the theory predicts that learners will initially map in their speech production the gender features of the L1 word onto the form expressing the same concept in the L2. The theory also predicts, however, that learners should be forced to construct novel morphosyntactic representations wherever the input unambiguously signals a different gender feature. So a German learner of French who has no evidence as to the gender of the word beurre (‘butter’) ought to attempt to say la beurre in early stages of acquisition because German Butter is feminine. Given appropriate cues to the correct gender, however, German learners ought to restructure their lexical representations for beurre. Restructuring need not mean immediate flawless speech performance since the learner has to suppress the feature of the German items when speaking French, and this requires a lot of practice. Nonetheless, restructuring ought to be measurable somehow in the learner’s behaviour, including the ability to self-correct or to notice the discrepancy between what one has said and what one ought to have said. But what of learners whose L1 does not include nouns morphosyntactically specified for gender subclasses? What of English learners of French? The theory predicts that they will also initially transfer the contents of their lexical entries and they will also transfer any correspondence operations they have. In English, the only way to interpret gender is as a semantic distinction based on the reference of nouns in context

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and relevant only for pronoun selection (Mathiot 1979). We might then ask if anglophones are especially sensitive to semantic distinctions in initially attempting to learn French gender. This was one of the questions investigated in Carroll (1999a). The latter very limited study suggests that initial-state learners are indeed highly sensitive to the potential role that referential categories can play as cues to gender classification. More interesting, however, was the finding that they are also somewhat sensitive to morphological structure as a gender classification cue. In the latter case, the distinctions cannot be transferred from the L1 so they must be part of the way in which the learning mechanisms encode linguistic distinctions. Either the distinctions are just part of the way in which the language faculty analyses gender distinctions, or else they are readily learnable. Either way, the research suggests that learners can learn novel categories given minimal amounts of relevant information. Let me now summarise the conclusions of this section. Universal Grammar is hypothesised to provide a range of representational features from which categories at various levels of analysis can be constructed. In addition, it is assumed that there are a variety of functional and formal constraints on how they can combine. Nonetheless, the major role in constraining the acquisition of categories would appear to fall on the theory of language acquisition. Some constraints may arise in first language acquisition from bootstrapping procedures if learners are predisposed to equate morphosyntactic categories initially with either prior semantic or prosodic categories. In SLA, the major “bootstrapping” procedure may well be lexical transfer. In both types of learning, however, categories appear to be acquired on the basis of properties of the stimuli learners hear. Consequently, we anticipate that cue-based learning will play a critical role in defining the ways in which categories are acquired. 2.3 Universal Grammar: formal universals Let me now turn to a discussion of formal universals. Formal universals are those universals which constrain the ways in which the units of the language can combine. For example, a constraint on the formation of phrases is that every syntactic phrase must include a lexical category of the same type (Jackendoff 1977; Stowell 1981; Emonds 1985). Let us call this constraint the Head Constraint. It considerably reduces the types of connections between lexical items and phrasal categories since it allows only (3.2a) below and precludes (3.2b). (3.2) a.

NP X

N

Y

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b.

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*NP X V Y where “X” and “Y” stand for variables, strings which can include anything including no category.

The Head Constraint coupled with specific properties of lexical items, an appropriate theory of phrase structure, say X-bar theory (plus a projection mechanism and licensing conditions, etc.) is supposed to explain the facts of (3.3).18 (3.3) a. Exhaustion is not a good thing. b. *Exhausted is not a good thing.

A noun phrase must contain a noun as the central syntactic element. Semantically related expressions belonging to other syntactic categories cannot replace the head. Thus, a verb cannot stand for a noun as the head of a noun phrase. In the P&P theory, properties of lexical items are presumed to be stored in the mental lexicon, including descriptions of the basic semantic types expressed by words. I have already noted that phrases are composed of functions and their arguments. Chomsky hypothesises that the lexicon includes a specification of the argument structure of lexical items such as verbs (corresponding to the traditional intransitive and transitive distinction).19 He also hypotheses that the lexicon lists the semantic or θ-roles which a function can assign to its arguments. See Jackendoff (1972: Ch. 2, 1985) and Grimshaw (1990). Properties of lexical items can project into phrasal categories, at each of the sub-levels of the morphosyntax. General properties of UG, which comprise X-bar theory, determine that phrases are organised into functional types, namely heads, complements, specifiers, and adjuncts. These functions are shown in graphic form in (3.4). (3.4) a.

Right branching (or left-headed) phrase XP XP

YP (adjunct)

ZP (specifier) X1 X0 0

WP (complement)

where X is the head and X1 and XP are projections of its features into intermediate and maximal phrases

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b.

Left-branching (or right-headed) phrase XP YP (adjunct) X1

XP ZP (specifier)

WP X0 0 where X is the head and X1 and XP are projections of its features into intermediate and maximal phrases

Languages vary as to the relative order of lexical heads to their complements. In earlier versions of generative grammar, it was assumed that children learned phrase structure rules to capture such effects. Order is now deemed to result from the setting of the head direction parameter, a label I take from Flynn (1987).20 This parameter locates the complement to the left or right of the lexical head. A second parameter regulates the order of heads to adjuncts and specifiers to head (Chomsky and Lasnik 1995: 53). (3.4) illustrates opposing specifications for all three parameters. Other orderings are possible (adjunct, specifier, complement, head; head, complement, specifier, adjunct; complement, head, specifier, adjunct; adjunct, specifier, head, complement, and so on). (3.5) expresses the head direction parameter formally (Lightfoot 1991: 6) (3.5) The head direction parameter a. XP → {Specifier, X′} b. X′ → {X or X′, (YP)} where the curly brackets indicate an unordered set

Now let us consider the matter of typological variation from the perspective of language acquisition and P&P theory. If language acquisition is just the setting of parameters (plus the learning of the idiosyncrasies of lexical items), then external influences on acquisition can be reduced to an absolute minimum. Chomsky observes: … within the principles-and-parameters approach … language acquisition involves the fixing of parameters, yielding what we may call the “core language”, including the lexicon. (Chomsky 1991b: 42)

Phrasal order has, not surprisingly, been discussed extensively in the first language acquisition literature because it is one of the dimensions along which languages vary. Clahsen (1988, 1990/1991), various studies in Meisel (1992), including Meisel and Müller (1992), Meisel (1994b), and Neeleman and Weerman

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(1997) propose that word order is acquired in child monolingual and bilingual first language acquisition by setting relevant parameters. Part of the argumentation for parameter setting in FLA relies on the fact that first language acquisition of the relevant phenomena takes place very rapidly and children seem to cognise right from the start the relevant relationships between position, finiteness and subject–verb agreement. While children learning German may start out using verbs in first, medial or final position, they statistically prefer final position even before they manifest finiteness or tense distinctions in their own speech (Clahsen 1982, 1988; Meisel and Müller 1992). But more importantly, their development exhibits a clustering of phenomena which have no logical dependency since once they acquire agreement they never put non-finite verbs in second position (Clahsen and Smolka 1986; Meisel 1994b). Finally, child learners are apparently never unsure of the position of verbs in embedded clauses; once they reliably express sentential complements, verbs appear in final position.21 It is precisely this clustering of unrelated phenomena and the speed with which children restructure their grammars which gives the P&P theory appeal and justifies the claim that parameters have deductive consequences in acquisition. I will return to these facts in the next section. Languages also vary as to the extent to which they require phonetically spelt out subjects. The Extended Projection Principle requires external arguments of the verb, in the sense of Williams (1981), to be instantiated in sentences. Thus, it follows that all languages have subjects in all sentence types. The pro-drop or null subject languages, like Italian or Greek, where the subject appears to be missing, permit the external argument to be expressed in the syntax by an empty category pro which behaves referentially like a simple personal pronoun and is assigned a referential value by pragmatic principles. In recent versions of P&P theory, referential categories are assumed to be licensed by features of the agreement system. “Strong” agreement licenses a pro subject and personal pronouns are only used in cases of contrast focus. Thus, we get the following contrast between Greek and English. (3.6) a.

piyen+i me to aftokinito. go+3 with  car ‘he’s going in the car.’ b. aft+i piyen+i me to aftokinito 3+pronoun go+3 with  car. ‘He’s the one going in the car’ c. He’s going in the car. d. *’s going in the car.

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This type of variation has been studied in both first and second language acquisition. Perhaps the best known L1 study is that of Hyams (1986). She argued that the tendency of early English child language to lack subjects could be attributed to the need to set the relevant parameter. Children would start out with the same parameter setting as children learning Italian (that is to say, set to null subjects) and would then reset the parameter when they discovered expletive subjects like there. Meisel (1990a), using data from learners of French and German, argued against this analysis, noting that it fails to account for the fact that children differentially omit subjects according to person, or that they leave out other categories as well. Bloom (1990) has also noted that children omit various categories and that the fact of omission alone does not motivate a parameter-setting analysis. In SLA, the acquisition of obligatory subjects has also been investigated, see White (1984, 1985b), Hilles (1986) and Phinney (1987). It is argued that early stages of the acquisition of English where, say, Spanish L2 learners omit surface subjects can be explained in terms of the transfer of the L1 parameter-setting. This would mean that Spanish learners assume that English allows pro to appear as the subject of a tensed sentence. When the learners start using phonetically overt expressions exclusively to fill subject position, they are said to have re-set the parameter. For the moment, let us lift our heads from the technical details. We see on examining the literature that it is in the area of formal universals that P&P has had its impact on SLA theorising. The grammars of the L1 and L2 are conceptualised in terms of different parameter settings in those cases where phenomena belonging to the same sub-system of the grammar are organised differently. It is hypothesised that parameter-settings transfer and thus are utilised when L2 learners attempt to speak the L2, or make acceptability judgements or perform other tasks in which they must deploy their linguistic competence. Parametersettings must be reset (in those cases where the L1 and L2 differ) before the learner can exhibit behaviour more in conformity with that of native speakers. When learner grammars change, they are said to exhibit parameter-resetting and this is said to be “explained” by P&P theory.

3.

Well, that looks good! So what’s the problem?

In this section, I would like to examine more critically the claim to “explanation” of P&P theory in SLA. I take it that explanation involves more than that the data can be made to be consistent with the theory. In other words, we will grant that

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the parameter-resetting account of development explains how second languages are acquired if it excludes grammar types which are not exhibited, if it attributes the right properties to the interlanguage grammars (e.g. predicts and describes the error types which show up in the interlanguage), and if it predicts the right stages and sequences of acquisition, including the prior acquisition of phenomena serving as necessary triggers to the resetting of the parameter. 3.1 UG and the problem of representational realism Part of the problem of knowing what to make of parameter-(re)setting as an explanation of SLA is in figuring out if the explanations are put forth as an account of the nature of representation in interlanguage grammars, or as an account of development. My reading of the literature is that parameter-setting is offered as a solution to the developmental problem of language acquisition; it is supposed to be part of a transition theory. In other words, learners learn what they learn because they have reset a parameter, and they could only learn what they learn in this way. I suspect that some researchers believe that UG is literally constraining dynamic acquisition processes, or even that parameter-resetting itself is such a process. To make sense of such claims requires that we figure out the place of UG in the functional architecture of the language faculty. Chomsky’s own views on the psycholinguistic status of UG and grammars are easily misconstrued. Sometimes when he discusses them, he is referring only to the cognitive distinctions speaker/hearers make. Thus, occasionally, when he speaks of knowledge of a generative grammar being “psychologically real”, he means that the distinctions modelled in his theory in a propositionally explicit way accurately characterise distinctions observable in human behaviour, e.g. via acceptability judgements or in assessments of synonymy, and so on (see, e.g. Chomsky 1982: 27–8). In other cases, Chomsky seems to be suggesting that the ways in which grammarians encode the distinctions are relevant for psychogrammars, that is to say the mechanisms which parse and produce utterances. It is important to understand that these are quite different characterisations and that the distinction matters for the functions we attribute to the rules and representations we propose as part of the learner’s knowledge. Matthews (1991) makes some interesting comments on this point. While on their intended construal, grammars true of a speaker/hearer are psychologically real, it would seem an open question whether the linguistic constructs to which grammars advert, including rules, representations, and the computations that figure in syntactic derivations, are psychologically real. Chomsky (1980: 197) argues that we are justified in attributing psychological

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INPUT AND EVIDENCE reality to the constructs postulated by a grammar true of [the] speaker/hearer In effect, the psychological reality of these constructs is assumed to be inherited from that of the grammar. But this assumption seems arguable. It might be objected that in the absence of specific evidence for their existence, these constructs must be assumed to be artifacts of the particular way in which the function computed by the speaker/hearer is specified, and as such cannot inherit the psychological reality of the grammar in which they figure. (Matthews 1991: 195).

Matthews is making the point that just because grammars encode psychologically relevant distinctions which are observable in speaker/hearer behaviour (and hence are psychologically real) does not mean that the rules or representations attributed to the grammars must be psychologically operational. In other words, we can construct formal grammars which include derivations without assuming that speaker/hearers construct derivations in real time. Similarly, we can constuct grammars to cover exactly the same behaviours, this time allowing them to include formal rules. It does not follow that speaker/hearers are computing the same rules in real time as they listen to and produce speech. The same holds of parameters. We may legitmately characterise differences across the world’s languages in terms of parameters and parameter-setting without thereby committing ourselves to the claim that learners compute parameter-settings as part of the acquisition process. We might assume that parameters are merely convenient devices which are part of our specification of the function-computing grammars and could be expressed in a variety of ways in psychogrammars. Talk of parameter-setting would thus be very loose metaphor and we would not want to build a theory of acquisition around the claim that learners are literally setting parameters as one of the operations of encoding mental representations. There is, however, a second interpretation of psychological reality, what Pylyshyn (1991) has called representational realism. Representational realism commits one to the view that the cognitive mechanisms one’s theory invokes (rules, representations, principles, parameters, etc.) are explicitly part of the cognitive computations. Let us consider another example. Early work in the L1 acquisition of English claimed that children acquire a rule of plural formation since children could be shown at a given stage to behave differentially towards a nonce form like bick and a second form wug pluralising the former with a voiceless sibillant /s/ and the latter with a voiced one /z/, entirely in conformity with generalisations statable over the adult language (Berko 1958). Such a rule might look like (3.7).

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(3.7) The plural rule Noun + Plural morpheme = Noun + /z/ /z/ → [−Voice]/ −Voice _____ −Cont.

Since the children could not have encountered the nonce forms in question in the stimuli they got from parents and other caretakers, they could not have learned the correct pronunciation of bicks or wugs by prior exposure. Since the children’s responses were systematic, there had to be some more abstract source of knowledge they were drawing on. Berko claimed that English children learned a linguistic rule. Understanding talk of rule-learning in a way consistent with representational realism would mean that the learner learns certain forms individually at the beginning, and then formulates an algorithm based on the regular case (cat/cats, dog/dogs, bunny/bunnies). This algorithm, perhaps something much like (3.7), would then be used to generate all plural forms in production. It would follow that regular plural forms of nouns would never be listed in longterm memory. On an interpretation of the data which is not committed to representational realism, talk of rules would not commit one to the idea that children have an algorithm in their mind/brains which they use to create plural forms in real time each time they produce one. The plural “rule” might be construed as a computational process used only to create plural forms for words heard only in the singular. Once created, such forms could be listed in longterm memory alongside plural forms extracted from the speech stimuli. Or, we might understand the rule as something which basically treats wug as a variant of bug without recourse to any internalised morphophonological algorithm. This process might be called analogy in a structural representational system. It is an implicit process in the view of classical connectionism. As Rumelhart and McClelland (1986, 1987) have shown, one can train a learning mechanism to output regular morphological forms without recourse to explicit structural algorithms. The connectionist network can also handle nonce forms. One can thus get the appearance of rule-governed behaviour without postulating rules as part of the mental apparatus. Rule-governed behaviour can also be accounted for by a generalisation over all of the plural forms the child has memorised one-by-one. By this I mean that the learner might have learned each word that she knows individually based on exposure to specific input, represented each plural form heard separately, and then have analysed the plural forms and abstracted a generalisation about the regular plural which is itself stored as information in longterm memory. Such generalisations are called redundancy rules and are not assumed to be on-line operations involved in either normal parsing or speech production. Usage involving learned forms would normally involve “looking up”

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stored representations and not computing a representation of the plural. In the case of novel expressions previously not encountered, the redundancy rule could be invoked to create the plural forms. In short, there are a variety of different mechanisms which could be invoked in a psychogrammar which give the appearance of rule-governed behaviour without necessitating the postulation of structural algorithms as real-time computations. This example should make clear the implications of representational realism. For the representational realist, rules are part of the psychogrammar used to parse and produce speech. The representational realist therefore invokes an explicit connection between grammatical representation and theories of processing. Is Chomsky a realist when it comes to UG? Yes, definitely, since he states that UG, the initial state of knowledge of the human child prior to experience, is coded in the genotype (Chomsky 1980: 83). Is Chomsky also a representational realist? I have found no clear evidence for this and a good deal of evidence to suggest the contrary.23 Chomsky does state that the steady state knowledge system, what I am calling here the I-language, is represented in the mind/brain (Chomsky 1980: 83) and hence can be assumed to be involved somehow in mental computation. But Chomsky does not state that principles and parameters are algorithms or functions mapping one representation onto another. On the contrary, he states only, in a variety of works greatly idealising the nature of acquisition, that UG can be considered to be a function mapping experience onto the steady state. This, it seems to me, does not commit him to saying that UG is part of the computations of the psychogrammar, directly consulted or “accessed” every time some stimuli is analysed, or even every time some rule is formed. Such a position leaves entirely open the ways in which UG comes to constrain the language acquisition process. Universal constraints on linguistic cognition might be realised in the structure-building processes of the parser. Berwick and Weinberg (1984) characterise subjacency in just this way. Or, they might be realised in the operations of the LAD. Berwick (1985) has made some proposals along this line. Dresher and Kaye (1990), and Dresher (1999) go even further and argue that the operations of any learning algorithm cannot be independent of the contents of the parameter theory. Other possibilities are imaginable. Chomsky himself has said virtually nothing on this issue. What about SLA P&P researchers? Do they view UG as an abstract and idealised characterisation of the initial state of knowledge prior to any experience with language? Do they view it as part of the genotype, being instantiated in the mature organism in the properties of the L1 grammar? Or, are they representational realists who regard UG as a store of information which can be “accessed” during the acquisition process? I have found no explicit discussion of this critical issue.

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Some of the core SLA writings prevaricate. Sometimes they describe UG as merely a set of abstract constraints on linguistic cognition.24 Sometimes the literature, however, appears to regard UG as a dynamic acquisition mechanism, “accessed” when the learner constructs mental representations. Observe that the second position necessitates representational realism. My interpretation of the extensive debates about whether adult L2 learners have “direct access” to UG or merely “mediated access” via their knowledge of the L1 (Clahsen and Muysken 1986, 1989; Bley-Vroman 1990; Duplessis et al 1987; White 1991b; Epstein et al. 1996) is quite simply that they make no sense unless at least some L2 generativists are adopting a representational realist stance. This debate makes no sense under an interpretation of UG whereby it is merely a characterisation of the initial state of knowledge, in the genes, prior to exposure to linguistic stimuli. It makes no sense since (i) there is no way to assess in adult L2 learners what their knowledge state was prior to exposure to linguistic stimuli, and (ii) there is no difference under this view between “direct access” to UG and “indirect access.”25 See Meisel (1991) and Schachter (1991) for additional discussion. In what follows, I shall therefore assume that the P&P-in-L2 position is not claiming that language cognition, prior to any exposure to linguistic stimuli, conforms to the constraints and restrictions described by the P&P theory, since this claim has no special consequences for SLA development. I shall instead assume that it refers to the claim that principles and parameters are mentally represented in such a way that they can and do constrain and restrict language learning, can be directly “accessed”, and are causally related to the linguistic structures which learners encode. 3.2 Can parameters be biological constructs? One major assumption of P&P theory is that linguistic development is under strong biological control. I stated that UG was assumed to be universal and innate. It is, by hypothesis, a characterisation of what the infant knows in advance of experience. Postulating a biological basis for language still leaves open a wide variety of possible interactions with environmental stimuli. It makes sense at this point, therefore, to discuss parameter-setting in terms of what Saleemi (1992: 32) has called three modes of learning, which is misleading in that the first two modes involve no learning at all. (3.8) a. b. c.

maturation selective learning observational learning

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INPUT AND EVIDENCE

Observational learning corresponds to induction. It will be taken up in Chapter 4, so I defer description until then. Maturation involves biological change following a genetically determined timetable. Since all cognition takes place in the brain, cognition is regulated by biological processes, indeed cognition is carried out by biological processes. It is plausible, therefore, to