SECOND LANGUAGE

ACQUISITION
DR. MONA SABIR
 TODAY’S CLASS

• Usage-Based Approaches to SLA

 FUNCTIONALIST

• Function includes:
• Systemic Functionalist – more socio in orientation
• Constructivist
• Emergentist § Use
§Meaning/Communication
• Socio-pragmatic § External
• Usage-based § Sociological

• Cognitive Linguistics – more psycho- in orientation

COGNITIVE & FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS

• View of Language
• Language as means of communication
• Language a social behaviour
• Importance of native speaker cultural norms
• Notion of speech acts
• Primary unit of language is functional
COGNITIVE & FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS

ØLanguage as:
§ Text
§ Discourse
within a community of practice

ØLanguage as:
§ Constructions
§ Lexical Patterns
§ Associations
within the mind/brain
 COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS
NOTE: COMPATIBLE WITH OTHER FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTS

Basic Premise 1:
• Language knowledge is like other kinds
of knowledge
i.e. all knowledge uses the same
mechanisms
à Connectionism
Contra Special Nativism
But note – is still Nativism
 COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS

Basic Premise 2:
• Knowledge = concepts
Meaning is basic/primary to language

(how does this differ from Generativism?)

 COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS

Basic Premise 3:
• Knowledge is stored in association with related
knowledge
• All knowledge, including language
• Networks of knowledge
 USAGE-BASED

ØLanguage learning is primarily based on learners’

exposure to L2 in use

Ø Learners induce the rules of their L2 from the input

by employing cognitive mechanisms that are not
exclusive to language learning
 CONSTRUCTS OF USAGE-BASED
APPROACHES
1. Constructions
2. Associative language learning
3. Rational cognitive processing
4. Exemplar-based learning
5. Emergent relation and patterns
 CONSTRUCTS OF USAGE-BASED
APPROACHES
1. Constructions
• Language = an inventory of a form-meaning
pairings / constructions

• Which can be learned based on the input

• Because the patterns are regular, with frequent

exemplars
 CONSTRUCTION GRAMMAR

• The range of what is a construction:

Morpheme e.g. pre-, -ing
Word e.g. avocado, anaconda, and
Complex word e.g. daredevil, shoo-in
Idiom e.g. going great guns
Ditransitive e.g. Subj V Obj1 Obj 2 (he baked her a
muffin)
Passive e.g. Subj aux VP (PP) (the armadillo
was hit by a car)
For more details,( Goldberg 2006, p. 5)
 CONSTRUCTS OF USAGE-BASED
APPROACHES
2. Associative language learning
• We learn language from usage in an associative
manner

• When a learner notices a word in the input for the

first time, a memory is formed that binds its feature
to a unitary representation
 COGNITIVE CONCEPTS

• Prototype Theory (Rosch 1973, 1975)

• The way we make sense of the world
• Human tendency to categorise
• Core concepts (with fuzzy boundaries)
 COGNITIVE CONCEPTS

• Examples of Prototypes
• Bird
• Cup
‘THE CUP’
 CONSTRUCTS OF USAGE-BASED
APPROACHES
3. Rational cognitive processing

• language learners are rational

• They work out the patterns, constructions, statistical
problem solvers…
• Probability based on frequency, recency and
context
 CONSTRUCTS OF USAGE-BASED
APPROACHES
4. Exemplar-based learning
• from large number of examples
à generalisations
• development of prototypes
 CONSTRUCTS OF USAGE-BASED
APPROACHES
5. Emergent relation and patterns

• language emerges in regular patterns

• complex, dynamic, adaptive
 COGNITIVE CONCEPTS

• Schemas
• A mental representation
• The frame for particular points of knowledge
• Differs from person to person (to some extent)
• Based on experience
• Stored in association with other schemas
 EVIDENCE

• Corpora: digitalized collections of language (Ex.

CHILDES, Talkbank)
• Classroom field research
• Psycholinguistic studies of processing
• Dense longitudinal recording
 COMMON MISUNDERSTANDINGS

• Connectionism is the new behaviorism

• Too much focus on the effect of frequency
• Cannot always define a ‘frequency effect’
ELLIS, O’DONNELL, AND ROMER (2014)

Research question:

How frequency, prototypicality and contingency

(cue-interpretation associations) jointly affect L2
learners’ construction grammar (verb-argument
constructions VACs)?
ELLIS, O’DONNELL, AND ROMER (2014)

Methods

• Participants: 31 German, 131 Spanish, 131 Czech, and

131 native speakers of English
• Free association task of 40 VAC frames
• Consulted the British National Corpus (BNC)
• DeltaP (a specific association measure) to calculate the
association strength between each verb type and each
VAC
• WordNet (lexical database) to see how prototypical the
verbs selected by the participants would be for each
VAC
ELLIS, O’DONNELL, AND ROMER (2014)

Main Findings

• The more frequently a verb occurred in VAC in

corpus, the more likely it was elicited as response
• The more strongly a verb and VAC were
associated, the more likely the verb was elicited as
a response
• The more prototypical a verb was for the VAC, the
more likely it was elicited as a response
 EXPLANATION OF OBSERVABLE
PHENOMENA IN SLA
• #1: Exposure to input is necessary
Usage-based approaches are input driven

• #2: a good deal of SLA happens incidentally

Cognitive operations involved in language usages
are tuning the system without being aware of it

• #3: learners know more that what they have been

exposed to
Prototype effects give a clear example

• #4: learners output often follows predictable paths

Interlanguage is systematic (predictable errors)
 EXPLANATION OF OBSERVABLE
PHENOMENA IN SLA
• #6: SLL is variable across subsystems
Variability is a natural consequence of input factors

• #7: there are limits on the effects of frequently on SLA

Usage based emphasize the importance of frequent
exposure

• #8: there are limits on the effect of a learner’s first language

on SLA
At every level of language, there is L1 influence both
negative and positive

• #9: there are limits on the effect of instruction

Explicit learning process can be effective for nonsalient
aspects of the language
 THE EXPLICIT/IMPLICIT DEBATE

• The bulk of language acquisition is implicit learning

from usage
• Implicit learning would not do the job alone
• Learners’ language systematicity emerges from
their history of interaction of implicit and explicit
language learning
Thank you and see you next class J