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Cognitive Approaches to Foreign Language Acquisition
Abstract
In this chapter, I discuss the intricate relationship between language, culture and cognition as proposed by scholars in the fields of philosophy, linguistic anthropology, and cognitive and applied linguistics, and set forth my ideas about this interconnectedness, which I believe plays a key role in how people perceive, comprehend and verbalise the world in their first languages.In doing so, I draw on the more moderate principles of linguistic relativity as a basis for contemplating cross-language awareness. In this respect, I also take into account the important contribution to the understanding of cognitive processing in language learning that arises from notions of universal grammar. My belief that language as a category is not given enough importance in the classroom for rising cross-language and intercultural awareness, but that language is made dependent on culture and intercultural principles, also contributes to a certain departure from the traditional approach to language learning. Therefore, in order to better establish language as a tool that can contribute significantly to a better understanding of the Other, both behaviourally and culturally, I attempt in this chapter to define the intricate relationship between language and culture and to identify more clearly its role in the process of understanding the behaviour of a particular group of people in relation to the use of their first languages.KeywordsCognitive linguisticsLinguistic relativityUniversal grammarLanguage transferLanguaculture
The analysis of language attitudes seeks to elucidate various dimensions of linguistic functioning, particularly where the social dimensions of discourse are manifest, such as lexical encoding, interaction positioning, and discursive strategies. It also considers elements aligned with cognitive models that shape language use in specific contexts, cultivated through socialization and the formation of social identity. Linguistic identity, a multifaceted construct, encompasses both linguistic and cultural knowledge and plays a key role in shaping personality. This study examines the linguistic identity of plurilingual students from various Ukrainian higher education institutions, assessing how plurilingualism impacts their identity. Using qualitative analysis of survey data from 31 students collected in autumn 2023, the study explores themes such as the influence of linguistic environments on plurilingualism, language attitudes, and self-identification. The findings indicate that all languages spoken by an individual contribute to shaping their linguistic identity, with self-identification as bilingual or plurilingual influenced by personal language proficiency and relevant language environments. The results support the idea that linguistic identity evolves over time, highlighting the dynamic nature of language and identity in response to varying social contexts.
Cognitive theorists propose that the cohesion of human cognition directs cognitive functions, including all higher cognitive processes like memory, language, problem-solving, etc., are different manifestations of the same basic system. This postulate is at odds with the mental conception of language acquisition, which assumes the existence of a specific linguistic technique pre-programmed by a universal grammar. This concept has given rise to the dichotomy of acquisition and learning, which contrasts two independent ways of perceiving a foreign language: on the one hand, unconscious and accidental acquisition, which provides tacit knowledge that allows achieving spontaneous language use and constitutes linguistic competence. The paper proposes the concept of foreign language learning as part of the cognitive tradition, in which learning is attained through problem-solving in purposeful activities, and in which explicit and implicit, declarative, and procedural processes are integrated into a single, complex operation, forming part of the overarching mechanisms of cognitive processes. The paper uses a closed questionnaire survey of 1st–4th year students of the State Higher Educational Institution “Uzhhorod National University” and the Ukrainian Humanities Institute, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Journalism. The developed questionnaire presents 14 cognitive strategies in foreign language learning. The results of the survey showed that students equally often use language patterns, subtext, context, adaptation to different language situations, information reconstruction, and mnemonics.
This is a written version of a lecture delivered at the Gevirtz Graduate School of Eduction at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The original series of lectures can be viewed at http://www.education.ucsb.edu/thematicschool/. In this “culture” lecture, the author explores the difficulties in using the concept in contemporary research with particular reference to its relational nature, its partiality, and the various problems that ethnography now addresses. In the end, the concept might have outlived its technical use, even as popular use increases.
This article examines D. Gentner's (1982) claim that nouns are universally predominant in children's early vocabularies. When a conservative method of counting nouns was used, 9 out of 10 22-month-old monolingual Mandarin-speaking children produced more verbs or action words than nouns or object labels in their naturalistic speech. When a more liberal definition of nouns was used, neither a noun nor a verb bias was found. Importantly, there was no difference in the type-token ratios of the children's use of nouns and verbs. Thus, a sampling bias type of explanation cannot explain the prevalence of verbs in these data. Instead, these data suggest the importance of a variety of linguistic and sociocultural input factors in early word learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The way we understand language diversity, how languages differ in representing reality, affects our ap-proach to understanding linguistic relativity, how that diversity affects thought. Historically, researchers di-vided over whether the diverse representations of reality across languages were natural or conventional, but all tacitly assumed an optimal fit between language and reality. Twentieth century anthropological linguists interested in linguistic relativity have questioned this assumption and sought to characterize "reality" with-out it by using domain-or structure-centered approaches. Arguments are presented favoring structure-centered approaches, along with a case illustration. A concluding discussion emphasizes the broader signifi-cance of language diversity in human development.
This paper examines naturalistic samples of adult-to-child speech to determine if variations in the input are consistent with reported variations in the proportions of nouns and verbs in children's early vocabularies. It contrasts two PRO-DROP languages, Italian and Mandarin, with English. Naturalistic speech samples from six 2:0 English-, six 1:11 Italian-, and ten 1:10 Mandarin-speaking children and their caregivers were examined. Adult-to-child speech was coded for the type frequency, token frequency, utterance position, and morphological variation of nouns and verbs as well as the types and placements of syntactic subjects and the pragmatic focus of adult questions. Children's spontaneous productions of nouns and verbs and their responses to adult questions were also examined. The results suggest a pattern consistent with the children's spontaneous production data. Namely, the speech of English-speaking caregivers emphasized nouns over verbs, whereas that of Mandarin-speaking caregivers emphasized verbs over nouns. The data from the Italian-speaking caregivers were more equivocal, though still noun-oriented, across these various input measures.
The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The 2 types of cognitive processes are embedded in different naive metaphysical systems and tacit epistemologies. The authors speculate that the origin of these differences is traceable to markedly different social systems. The theory and the evidence presented call into question long-held assumptions about basic cognitive processes and even about the appropriateness of the process-content distinction.
In the context of non‐native language acquisition or use, “transfer” broadly refers to the influence of the learner's native language. When the influence of the native language leads to errors in the acquisition or use of the target language, we say that negative transfer or interference occurs. When the influence of the native language leads to immediate or rapid acquisition or use of the target language, we speak of positive transfer or facilitation. Applied linguists tend to focus much more on negative transfer than on positive transfer because it is generally believed that only negative transfer presents teaching and learning challenges. Negative transfer manifests itself in different linguistic domains, including phonetics and phonology (or pronunciation), morphology and syntax, vocabulary, and pragmatics.
This book addresses the fundamental issue: does the Chinese strategic mind have its own idiosyncrasies which differ considerably from those of the Western mind? It expounds and unravels the particular characteristics of the Chinese strategic mind: what they are, how they are evolved and what strategic implications they have. This book adopts a holistic approach to an analysis of Chinese strategic thinking, drawing upon the fields of literature (including the sources of both the Chinese and English languages), military studies, political science, history, sociology, psychology, philosophy, linguistics and business strategy. It combines a detailed consideration of these disciplines with a series of case studies to elucidate the formation, nature and crucial managerial implications of the idiosyncratic Chinese strategic mind.
This book argues that Second language teaching has not been well served by recent approaches to the description of language content. The book explores how Cognitive Linguistics offers teachers a description of language that can translate into practical classroom activities.
Recent years have seen a revolution in our knowledge of how children learn to think and speak. In this volume, leading scholars from these rapidly evolving fields of research examine the relationship between child language acquisition and cognitive development. At first sight, advances in the two areas seem to have moved in opposing directions: the study of language acquisition has been especially concerned with diversity, explaining how children learn languages of widely different types, while the study of cognitive development has focused on uniformity, clarifying how children build on fundamental, presumably universal concepts. This book brings these two vital strands of investigation into close dialogue, suggesting a synthesis in which the process of language acquisition may interact with early cognitive development. It provides empirical contributions based on a variety of languages, populations and ages, and theoretical discussions that cut across the disciplines of psychology, linguistics and anthropology.
The linguistic relativity hypothesis, the proposal that the particular language we speak influences the way we think about reality, forms one part of the broader question of how language influences thought. Despite long-standing historical interest in the hypothesis, there is relatively little empirical research directly addressing it. Existing empirical approaches are classified into three types. 1. Structure-centered approaches begin with language differences and ask about their implications for thought. 2. Domain-centered approaches begin with experienced reality and ask how different languages encode it. 3. Behavior-centered approaches begin with some practical concern and seek an explanation in language. These approaches are compared, and recent methodological improvements highlighted. Despite empirical advances, a theoretical account needs to articulate exactly how languages interpret experiences and how those interpretations influence thought. This will entail integrating theory and data concerning both the general relation of language and thought and the shaping influence of specific discursive structures and practices.
The book from which these sections are excerpted (N. Chomsky, Rules and Representations, Columbia University Press, 1980) is concerned with the prospects for assimilating the study of human intelligence and its products to the natural sciences through the investigation of cognitive structures, understood as systems of rules and representations that can be regarded as “mental organs.” These mental structui′es serve as the vehicles for the exercise of various capacities. They develop in the mind on the basis of an innate endowment that permits the growth of rich and highly articulated structures along an intrinsically determined course under the triggering and partially shaping effect of experience, which fixes parameters in an intricate system of predetermined form. It is argued that the mind is modular in character, with a diversity of cognitive structures, each with its specific properties arid principles. Knowledge of language, of the behavior of objects, and much else crucially involves these mental structures, and is thus not characterizable in terms of capacities, dispositions, or practical abilities, nor is it necessarily grounded in experience in the standard sense of this term.Various types of knowledge and modes of knowledge acquisition are discussed in these terms. Some of the properties of the language faculty are investigated. The basic cognitive relation is “knowing a grammar”; knowledge of language is derivative and, correspondingly, raises further problems. Language as commonly understood is not a unitary phenomenon but involves a number of interacting systems: the “computational” system of grammar, which provides the representations of sound and meaning that permit a rich range of expressive potential, is distinct from a conceptual system with its own properties; knowledge of language must be distinguished from knowledge of how to use a language; and the various systems that enter into the knowledge and use of language must be further analyzed into their specific subcomponents.
studies of behavior and event-related brain potentials from normal adults, congenitally deaf adults, and normally developing children during visual attentional and language processing are summarized / the results suggest that different subsystems within vision and within language display different degrees of experience-dependent modification / within vision, the absence of competition from auditory input has most marked effects on the organization of systems important in processing peripheral information / within language, delayed exposure to a language has pronounced effects on development of systems important in grammatical processing and many fewer effects on lexical development / various accounts for these differential effects of early experience are discussed (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Based on the bilingualism literature, the author's recent experiences in Austrian German, and a discourse analysis perspective, a way of looking at biculturalism is hammered together to enable an understanding of how adult L2 acquisition proceeds in more and less cultural ways. (Bilingualism, biculturalism, discourse, ethnography, Whorf)
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@article{LSY:3130768,author = {Agar,Michael},title = {The biculture in bilingual},journal = {Language in Society},volume = {20},issue = {02},month = {6},year = {1991},issn = {1469-8013},pages = {167--182},numpages = {16},doi = {10.1017/S0047404500016250},URL = {http://journals.cambridge.org/article_S0047404500016250},}
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The biculture in bilingual
Michael Agar (1991).
Language in Society , Volume 20 , Issue02 , June 1991, pp 167-182
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The biculture in bilingual
Michael Agar June 1991
Language in Society,
,Volume20,
Issue02,
June 1991,
pp 167-182
http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0047404500016250
Michael Agar
(1991).
The biculture in bilingual.
Language in Society,
20,
pp 167-182.
doi:10.1017/S0047404500016250.
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The literature on crosslinguistic influence (Sharwood Smith and Kellerman 1986) or transfer , as it has been traditionally called, is by now quite extensive, as befits a topic which has been wreathed in controversy ever since the fledgling days of second language acquisition (SLA). Perhaps few other research interests have been so affected by shifts of paradigm or fashion; yet whether we consider its importance primary or peripheral, an understanding of the part played by knowledge of one's first or other languages in the acquisition of a second remains an essential goal of SLA theory.
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Photocopy. Ann Arbor : University Microfilms, 1974. Thesis--University of Michigan. Bibliography: leaves 166-170.
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