Apparently, there are significant
individual differences in the people's ability to learn a second
language. What causes them? And what predicts fast and successful
acquisition of a second language?
There are two approaches that try to
explain these individual differences. Probably
the best explanation combines both approaches.
The first
approach argues that the acquisition of a second language is dependent on the same
linguistic abilities that allowed for the first language acquisition. This
approach is supported by studies showing that phonological awareness, syntactic
knowledge, orthographic knowledge and vocabulary in the first language usually
predict success in second language acquisition.
When a child immigrates with high cognitive academic language
proficiency in this first language (a level which is usually achieved through
reading), he usually acquires high cognitive academic proficiency in the second
language faster and better than a child
immigrating with only basic communication skills in his first language. According to this view, linguistic measures are the best predictors of
success in second language acquisition.
The second approach argues that second language acquisition is like any other
learning process. In any learning process we identify and perceive
systematic and probabilistic structures in our environment. Acquiring second ( and first) language is mainly a
process of acquiring and assimilating the statistical features of our
linguistic environment.
What does this mean?
Statistical
learning refers to the cognitive process by which repeated patterns, or
regularities, are extracted from the sensory environment. Such learning often
happens without an intention to learn and without an awareness of what was
learned.
How do babies acquire language, and how
do they identify words in the stream of voice sounds they hear when someone
talks to them? Saffran and colleagues
showed that 8-month old 2 infants are sensitive to auditory statistical
regularities. They exposed infants to a stream of syllables, constructed from
12 syllables (e.g., tu, pi, ro, bi, da, ku, go, la, bu, pa, do, ti) that formed
four tri-syllabic “words” (e.g., tupiro, bidaku, golabu, padoti). After a 2-
minute exposure to streams such as “bidakupadotibidakugolabutupiro …”, infants
were tested in a habituation procedure with two tri-syllables. One was a “word”
(e.g., “bidaku”) heard during the 2 min-exposure phase, and the other was a
foil (e.g., “tudabu”). The foils were composed of three syllables that were
never paired together. Saffran and colleagues found that infants showed more
interest in the foil than in the word, as indexed by increased listening time (e
(i.e., the duration of showing interest in each tri-syllable). That is, infants are capable of
statistical learning after just two minutes of exposure to sound sequences.
Oral
and written words in any language are built by rules that restrict and
determine their internal structure (for example, the sound sequence
"shchtz" is not possible in English, and "lpstzr" cannot be
an English word). Each language has its
own statistical structure, and when people acquire a second language, they implicitly
acquire, according to the second approach, a new set of statistical rules.
Thus, according to the second approach, the fundamental cognitive faculty of implicit
correlation-learning which underlies any form of learning plays a primary role in second language acquisition.
The degree of similarity between the
statistical characteristics of the first and second languages can affect the
process of statistical learning of the second language structure. Like any other cognitive ability, individual differences in
sensitivity to correlations in the environment can affect second language
acquisition.
Is it really so? And how do we measure it? In the next post.
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