Berko Gleason and Bernstein Ratner (1998: p.

v) state that a 'psycholinguistic discussion of

language processing would not be complete without consideration of bilingualism and second
language learning', this is not (as yet) the standard position in psychology

So why is there such an obvious reluctance in psychologists to consider second language

issues? And how much can we generalize findings from Lr acquisition studies to SLA? What
are the similari- ties and differences between the two processes? Are there situations (e.g.
early learning) when SLA can be seen as virtually identical to Lr acquisition? Can we
distinguish two types of SLA depending on whether the L2 is primarily acquired in the host
environment or in a formal school setting? And more generally, what are the main types of
bilingualism and how do they differ in psychological terms?

four general issues here concerning I~r acquisition and its research:

(r) mysterious uniformity;

here seems to be a general agreement amongst scholars that children acquire an impressive
amount of language in a comparatively short time without much direct tuition and with
remarkable commonality (Shatz 2007).

his uniformity is quite mysterious in at least two ways: first, after decades of intensive
research, we still do not know enough about the details of the acquisition process or why
there is such little variability in its ultimate outcome.

Berko Gleason (2005: 5), for example, concludes that 'explaining what it is that children
acquire during the course of language development is easier than explaining how they do it',
and N. Ellis (2005b: 3) adds that 'never has there been so much debate as there currently is
concerning the mechanisms of first language acquisition'.

The second source of puzzlement concerns the fact that although there is a
generalemphasisintheliteratureontheuniformityoftheLr acquisitionprocess, a closer look
reveals a great deal of individual-level variation in how native speakers acquire and use their
Lr
We tend to talk about 'native-like proficiency' in a language, but the content of this term is
rather difficult to define scien- tifically beyond Doughty's (2003: 258) specification that
children learning their

Lr are 'eventually indistinguishable from other native speakers of their speech community'

Yet, within the Lr speech community there appears to be a con- siderable diversity across Lr
speakers' command of their mother tongue, from their pronunciation to their syntactic or
pragmatic skills

the variability in Lr acquisition

(2) nature versus nurture;

innate language knowledge children bring to the learning process: the proposed innate
language endowment is typically, but not always, associated with a 'Universal Grammar'
within a generative linguis- tic framework.

and whether the learning mechanisms they apply are domain-specific (i.e. dedicated to
language processing) or domain-independent (i.e. non-language- specific general learning
capacities).

L1 competence is fully emergent during development as infants apply general cognitive

mechanisms to processing language input.

overview of this debate, also outlining an interim, 'soft' position betWeen the two
extremes.

As a preliminary, the current momentum in developmental psycholinguistics increasingly

supports the position that our mother tongue can be learnt without being fitted with any
special linguistic endowment as part of the human genome, but we should note-as will be
made clear in Ch. 3-that almost all the main experts in the field acknowledge that the jury is
still out regarding this question.

If the jury is (still) out on a subject, people do not yet know the answer or have

not yet decided if it is good or bad:

(3) the evolution of language acquisition research;

the first half of the twentieth century was character- ized by largely descriptive work, and this
period was followed by a phase when the researchers' main concern was to test the claims
of theoretical linguistics about predispositions specific to languag

(4) early milestones in L1 development

certain milestones of language development occur with an impressive regularity in the

majority of children, particularly in the first year of life

many infants produce their first words much the same way all over the world. This happens
approximately when they are 12 months old, and the speech pro- duction and perception
timeline up to this point-including the process of 'locking in' the sounds of our LI ppears to be
fairly universal.

children display increasing variation in both the pattern and the rate of language acqui- sition
during this subsequent period, Singleton and Ryan (2004) conclude that at least with regard to
the development of syntax we can observe a stable sequence of milestones associated with
reasonably well-defined age norms.

bilingualism'(a term that is often used to .stand for multili11gualism

the term is often extended to postpubertal L2 learners-the main targets of SLA research-who
master their second lan- guage in a formal educational environment as a school subject.

The term 'bilingualism' does not refer to a uniform phenomenon but rather !' to a range of
different patterns and combinations of acquiring and knowing multiple languages, depending
on factors such as the number of languages involved, their acquisition timelines, the
amount of opportunity for their use, and their relative dominance in different situations.

The two extremes are (r) balanced bilingualism, featuring native-like competence in two
languages, typically resulting from double Lr acquisition in infancy (or 'bilingual first
language acquisition'; see Genesee and Nicoladis 2007); and (2) a very broad interpre- tation
of bilingualism that defines the term as 'the ability to produce complete meaningful utterances
in two languages' (Herschensohn 2007: 4

based on language-specific differences in a span of dimensions such as the degree of

proficiency (often broken down to components such as fluency, accuracy, comprehension,
etc.); the time-frame of acquisition; the context of acquisition (age and manner); the
context of use (e.g. relative frequency, purpose, modalities, sociolinguistic status); and the
structural distance between the languages.

it makes it difficult to compare studies that examine various types of bilingualism;

it is not quite clear what exactly 'bilingualism' means in one of the most cutting-edge
contemporary research areas, the study of the 'neurobiologi- cal correlates of bilingualism

'bilingualism' appears to be emerging as an academic discipline independent of applied

linguistics or SLA research

(r) those who specialize in the (neuro)cognitive analysis of the bilingual mind/brain, with an
emphasis on language representation, processing, and performance associated with
bilingual competence; and (2) those whose interest lies in edu- cational issues such as
language contact and planning within multicultural societies. These two rather disparate
directions share the common theme of investigating how two active languages interact and
compete with each other either at the cognitive or at the societal level.

'bilinguality' and 'bilingualism', re

..

As two different approaches in theoretical linguistics, usage-based and universal grammar-

based (UG-based) are two theories in language learning from various perspectives: the former
focuses on the influence of experience, input, and frequency in language learning (i.e.,
cognitive linguistics), while the latter emphasizes the existence of an innate universal
grammar and a set of rules as underlying basis for the formation of correct g rammatical
sentences (i.e., generative grammar). https://www.intechopen.com/online-first/69557

..

Second language

two land- mark articles are usually mentioned in this respect, Pit Corder's (1967) 'The
Significance of Learners' Errors' and Larry Selinker's (1972) 'lnterlanguage'.

The field of Second Language Acquisition research focuses on how languages are learnt' (

in the absence of an elaborate acquisitional dimension, these scholars emphasized the

representational and processing/use aspects of the L2., or more specifically, as Hulstijn
(2007a) summarizes, (r) the representation and (2) the processing of linguistic infor- mation,
(3) the communicative interaction among L2. learners or between L2 learners and native
speakers of the L2, (4) learner attributes, and (5) social context.

..

Lr and L2 acquisition share certain underlying psychological processes-for example, the

method we use for learning new word forms (MacWhinney 2004)-and the transfer from Lr to
L2 knowledge also plays a substantial role in SLA.

the former is invariably considered successful by the learners themselves (i.e. we do not hear
people complaining about not speaking their mother tongue well enough

In contrast, motivation is a basic issue in Sl,A,

it also appears to be automatic in the sense that the learners' motivation does not play a role in
whether or not they learn the languag

r acquisition appears to be definitely homogeneous. SLA also involves many factors and
processes that are not evident in the acquisition of a mother tongue
Lr acquisition is that it goes hand in hand with the infant's learning about the world around
him/her (N. Ellis 2002a). In contrast, SLA displays a marked imbalance between the
developmental level of the L2 code and learners' pre-existing conceptual knowledge as well
as their thinking and problem-solving skills.

both the quality and quantity of Lr input significantly exceed the L2 input that language
learners are typi- cally exposed to

In contrast, SLA either does not involve any systematically delivered 'learner-directed
speech', or when it does, this tends to comprise artificial classroom discourse. unlike in Lr
acquisition, the scaffolding of interlocutors is not guaranteed in SLA

The ballpark view is that Lr acquisition relies on efficient implicit learnin

Lr acquisition also involves explicit learn- ing mechanisms (e.g. in vocabulary learning) and,
similarly, L2 acquisition also includes a certain amount of implicit learning (e.g. as part of
automati- zation), yet it is an incontestable fact that we find very little of the effortless and
automatic nature of Lr acquisition in the L2 process.

Multilinguism

While a very broad understanding of bilingualism involves competence in two languages in

general, regardless of their level of devel- opment, the more common interpretation of the
term refers to cases when two or more languages happen simultaneously in early childhood,
at the LI acquisition phase. The relatively new term of 'third language acquisition' has been
introduced to distinguish multiple L2 learning from multiple LI learning tbat is subsumed by
the bilingualism label. In other words, 'third language acquisition' can be seen as SLA + r (or
SLA + 2, 3, etc.)

A person who can speak multiple languages is known as a polyglot or a multilingual

L3 acquisition is more complex than SLA because both the process and the product of
acquiring an L2 can potentially influence the acquisition of additional languages. This makes
sense: learners of an L3 have prior language learning knowledge and, as the authors point out,
these learners possess metalinguistic skills and meta- cognitive strategies that a monolingual
learner lacks.
the scholars show that the effects of the relationship between multiple languages can be
explained by two proposed thresholds in the levels of the bilingual's compe- tence: a low level
of competence in a new language is likely to have negative effects, but beyond a certain
threshold the negative consequences disappear. Then, beyond an upper threshold, the learner
is likely to experience positive

I offered the broad organizing prin- ciple that the term 'bilingualism' tends to be associated
with multiple and simultaneous Lr acquisition, whereas 'third language acquisition' with mul-
tiple and usually overlapping L2 acquisition
..
SUMMARY
• Many animals, including even insects, have surprisingly rich communication systems.
• Animal communication systems in the wild are nevertheless tied to the here and now, and
can only
communicate about a very limited number of topics (mainly food, threat, and sex).
• Hockett described “sixteen design features” that he thought characterized human spoken
language.
• Early attempts to teach apes to talk failed because the apes lack the necessary articulatory
apparatus.
•
Laterattemptstoteachapestocommunicateusingsigns(e.g.WashoeandKanzi)showatleastthatapes
can use combinations of signs in the appropriate circumstances, although it is unclear whether
they are
using words and grammatical rules in the same way as we do.
• Some language processes are localized in specific parts of the brain, particularly the left
cortex.
• Broca’s area is particularly important for producing speech, while Wernicke’s area is
particularly
important for dealing with the meaning of words.
• Damage to particular areas of the brain leads to identifiable types of disrupted language.
• We are not born with functions fully lateralized in the two cortical hemispheres; instead,
much
specialization takes place in the early years of life.
• There is a sensitive period for language development during which we need exposure to
socially
meaningful linguistic input.
• The stronger notion of a critical period for language acquisition between the ages of 2 and 7
cannot be
correct because there is clear evidence that lateralization is present from birth, and that older
children and
adults are surprisingly good at acquiring language.
• The acquisition of syntax by the left hemisphere is particularly susceptible to disruption
during the
sensitive period.
• The relation between language and cognitive processes in development is complex.
• Infants do not need to attain object permanence before they can start naming objects.
• The cognitive development of deaf children proceeds better than it should if language
underlies
cognition, and the linguistic development of blind children proceeds better than it should if
cognition
underlies language.
• Parents adapt their language to the needs of their children, and the way that caregivers speak
to blind
children leads to differences in their grammatical development compared with sighted
children.
•
Languageusehasimportantsocialprecursors;inparticular,parentsappeartohave“conversations”wi
th
infants well before the infants start to use language.
• The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that differences in languages between cultures will lead
to their
speakers perceiving the world in different ways and having different cognitive structures.
• The most important sources of evidence in evaluating the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis are
studies of colour
naming.
•
Colournamingandmemorystudiesshowthatalthoughbiologicalfactorsplaythemostimportantrolei
n
dividing up the colour spectrum, there is some linguistic influence on memory for colours.
• There is evidence that language can affect performance on some perceptual, memory, and
conceptual
tasks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiTsduRreug Krashen

a level of anxiety that an individual (e.g., a musician, an athlete) perceives as assisting

performance