 Greetings

 Define cognition
 State why there is a need to study the cognitive facet of SLA
 The scope of cognitive research, this is in sharp contrast with many of the data on language
learning SLA researchers normally consider, which involve stretches of discourse, multi-turn
interactions with human interlocutors, extended texts, referential and social meaning, and
even years of studying, using or living with an L2. Thus, the differences in grain size,
temporal and ontological, of the various phenomena that are brought together into cognitive
explorations of L2 learning are puzzling.
 Explain what is in this chapter.
 Traditional Information processing and emergentism.
 Focus is on memory and attention in l2 learning.

 INFORMATION PROCESSING IN PSYCHOLOGY AND SLA

 Information Processing emerged in the field of psychology in the 1970 as a result of the
cognitive revolution in the 1950s.
 A reaction against behaviorist theories’ “stimulus response explanation” for learning
 “The human mind is viewed as a symbolic processor that constantly engages in mental
processes which operate on mental representations and intervene between input and
output.”
 Performance, rather than behavior, is a key word in information processing theories.
 First, human cognitive architecture is made of representation and access.
 Second, mental processing is comprised of two different kinds of computation: automatic or
fluent.
 Third, cognitive resources such as attention and memory are limited.
 Information processing theories distinguish between representation and access.
 Bialystok and Sharwood Smith (1985) representation (knowledge) or access (processing)
 Linguistic representation is comprised of three kinds of knowledge: grammatical, lexical and
schematic or world related.
 Access entails the activation or use of relevant knowledge via two different mechanisms
known as automatic and controlled processing.
 Norman Segalowitz (2003) automatic and a standard shift (manual operation)
 Human cognition can work both ways. Our feelings, actions, perceptions are product of the
synthesis between the two.
 Automatic thinking is a quick, low-effort and nonconscious way of perceiving things,
whereas controlled thinking (handled by the central executive) requires high effort and is
deliberate.
 Controlled thinking can trigger a “bottleneck effect” resulting to limited capacity model of
information processing (the model predicts that performance that draws on controlled
processing is more variable and more vulnerable to stressors)
 A widely employed method in the study of automaticity is the dual-task condition, where the
researcher creates processing stress by asking participants to carry out two tasks
simultaneously, a primary task and a distracting task.
 THE POWER OF PRACTICE: PRCEDURALIZATION AND AUTOMACITY
 Skill acquisition theory defines learning as the gradual transformation from controlled too
automatic.
 The process by which declarative or explicit knowledge (basic facts) is converged into
procedural or implicit knowledge (knowing how, e.g., tying a shoelace) is called
proceduralization or automatization.
 The power law of learning says that (1) the time it takes to perform a task decreases
with the number of repetitions of that task; and (2) the decrease follows the shape of a
power law
 . The final outcome of the gradual process of proceduralization or automatization is
automaticity, which is defined as automatic performance that draws on implicit-procedural
knowledge and is reflected in fluent comprehension and production and in lower neural
activation patterns (Segalowitz, 2003).
 Two misinterpretations of skill acquisition tenets are common: (a) that automaticity is simply
accelerated or speedy behavior; and (b) that L2 learners simply accumulate rules that they
practice until they can use them automatically.

 AN EXEMPLARY STUDY OF SKILL ACQUISITION THEORY IN SLA: DEKEYSER

 Robert DeKeyser investigated many of the predictions of information processing and
cognitive skill theory in a clever and complicated study. DeKeyser recruited 61 college
student volunteers and taught them a miniature language that he called Autopractan. He did
so over 11 weeks and 22 one-hour sessions, using picture-and-sentence exercises
delivered through a computer program

 One challenge in this kind of study is that participants may not see the benefits of trying
hard to study a language that they know is artificial, and therefore of no use to them outside
the experiment. In an effort to address this problem, the researcher told the volunteers their
monetary compensation for participating in the study would vary depending on their scores
during the experiment. The difference was a modest $8 per hour for top scores versus $6
per hour for bottom scores, but this ought to have been enough of an incentive for
undergraduate students in the mid-1990s!

 The first phrase demonstrated explicit, declarative knowledge. It involved presenting all
vocabulary and grammar rules of Autopractan and having participants learn them well over
the first six sessions (about three weeks).

 The second phase was practice. It was designed to support proceduralization, or the
transformation of performance from controlled too automatic. It involved different things for
different groups, but it always took 15 sessions (eight weeks) and exactly the same total
number of exercises for everyone.

 Finally, the last session in the study (session number 22) was devoted to testing participants
on four Autopractan rules via comprehension and production test items.
 In order to document the product of learning, scores on the post-tests administered in the
final session of the study were also inspected. It turned out that gains were, as predicted,
skill-specific. For a given rule, the participants in the first two groups outperformed each
other only on the items that tested them in the same modality in which they had practiced
that rule. By the same token, the balanced regime of comprehension and production
experienced by the third group appeared to be effective for both comprehension and
practice, with gains comparable to those made by the other two groups under the same-
modality conditions.

 As you see, testing the predictions of cognitive skill acquisition theory for L2 learning is
complicated. Few studies have been conducted using this paradigm, and even fewer exist
that document automatization over a sustained period of practice like DeKeyser (1997) did.

 LONG-TERM MEMORY
 Long term memory is about representation
 Two kinds of long-term memory: explicit-declarative memory and implicit-declarative
memory.
 Knowing how to ride a bike or read a book relies on implicit memory. Consciously recalling
items on your to-do list involves the use of explicit memory.
 Explicit-declarative memory supports recollection of facts or event, it is served by the
hippocampus in the human brain.
 Implicit-procedural memory supports skills and habit learning, it is served by the neocortex
in the brain.
 Endel Tulving, an Estonian psychologist, proposed a further distinction in this bifurcation –
semantic and episodic memory.
 Semantic memory pertains to relatively decontextualized knowledge of facts that ‘everyone
knows’.
 Episodic memory involves knowledge of the events in which people are personally involved
or ‘the events we’ve lived through’.
 Semantic memory consists of a “mental thesaurus” that provides “the memory necessary for
the use of language” (life events and experiences) (Tulving, 1972, p. 386), whereas episodic
memory consists of memory for “temporally dated episodes or events, and the temporal-
spatial relations” among them (factual and conceptual)

 LONG-TERM MEMORY AND L2 VOCABULARY KNOWLEDGE

 Vocabulary knowledge strength concerns the relative ability to use a given known word
productively or to recognize it passively. Thus, strength is a matter of degree of
proceduralization in implicit memory.
 It is typically found that learners know more words receptively than productively, particularly
if they are infrequent or difficult words, and that this gap becomes smaller as proficiency
develops.
 Vocabulary size refers to the total number of words known and represented in long-term
memory.
 Vocabulary size can be very tricky because let’s say for example in L1 users, a five-year-old
child begins school with an established vocabulary of about 5,000-word families, and a
typical 30-year-old college-educated adult ends up knowing about 20,000 word families. For
L2 users, new vocabulary presents a formidable challenge. They need to learn about 3,000
new words in order to minimally follow conversations in the L2, and about 9,000 new word
families if they want to be able to read novels or newspapers in the L2.
 Vocabulary depth resides in the realm of both explicit and implicit memory and refers to how
well the known words are really known, that is, how elaborated, well specified and
structured (or how analyzed, in Bialystok’s 2001 sense) the lexical representations are.
 Depth of knowledge includes whether L2 learners know how a word sounds (/di-‘zərt/ in a
meal and /‘de-zərt/ in a landscape), how it is spelled (exude, not exhude), how many other
word parts it can appear with (pre–, –ment,–er,–s,–ing), what is likely to precede or follow a
word (make a decision, do exercise; mental state, state of affairs/mind), how many
meanings the word may have (demonstrate = to show and to protest), in what registers
different synonyms may be preferred (weather, climate), or how frequently and in what
contexts the word will occur (many oaths in court but not in hospitals, many incisions in
hospitals but not in court).
 Focusing on episodic memory and conceptual development, Aneta Pavlenko (1999) has
explored the hypothesis that L2 words learned in naturalistic contexts allow for the encoding
of richer information in episodic memory than L2 words learned in classrooms, because the
former is learned more experientially and the latter more declaratively. She therefore
suggests that conceptual L2 development will be fostered in naturalistic (i.e., experiential)
learning contexts but might be limited in foreign language contexts.
 Psycholinguists Judith Kroll (at Penn State University) and Annette de Groot (at the
University of Amsterdam) have been prolific contributors in this area (Kroll and de Groot,
1997). In their work they have shown that when bilinguals recognize or produce words,
information encoded for both languages, not just the one of current use, is initially activated.
This phenomenon is known as non-selectivity and has been documented also for three
languages in trilingual by Lemhfer et al. (2004).