INPUT PROCESSING IN ADULT SLA

NURPRADINI GALLA
 INPUT PROCESSING IN ADULT SLA
Imagine the speaker of Spanish learning English. Imagine another
English speaker learning Spanish in a formal setting. That learner studies
the preterit in Spanish. A month later she hears some- one say Juan
estudió en Cuernavaca ‘John studied in Cuernavaca’.

However, she interprets this sentence to mean that John is studying

in Cuernavaca, even though she has studied and practiced past tense
formation in Spanish and even though English also clearly marks past
from present .
 The Theory and Its Constructs
making form–meaning connections during comprehension:
Project 1

• Under what conditions do learners make

initial form–meaning connections?
Project 2

• Why, at a given moment in time, do they make

some and not other form– meaning connections?

• What internal psycholinguistic strategies do learners

Project 3

use in comprehending sentences and how might this

affect acquisition?
Where IP fits into an acquisition scheme.

Learners are driven to get Comprehension for learners is initially

meaning while quite effortful in terms of cognitive
comprehending. processing and working memory.

At the same time, learners are limited

Learners may make use of certain
capacity processors and cannot pro- cess
universals of IP but may also make use of
and store the same amount of information
the L1 input processor (or parser, which we
as native speakers can during moment-by-
will define shortly).
moment processing.
At this point, the learner most likely does not
process the non-content words or the inflections
on nouns and verbs, process referring
specifically to actually making connections
between meaning and form (as opposed to mere
“noticing”).

■ In English, -ing is the sole
marker of the semantic
notion of an event in
progress
■ indication of IN
PROGRESS in the sentence
with -ing. This contrasts
■ EXAMPLE
■ in ‘The cat is sleeping [IN
PROG- RESS]
■ ‘The cat sleeps ten hours
everyday’, where the
meaning of -s of ‘sleeps’
[THIRD PERSON,
SINGULAR, ITERATIVE]
is encoded lexically in ‘the
cat [THIRD-PERSON,
SINGULAR]’ and ‘everyday
[ITERATIVE]’.
Until now, we have considered only grammatical markers that carry
meaning such as -s on the end of a noun means ‘more than one’ and -ing
means ‘in prog- ress’. But there are some grammatical markers, albeit
not many, that do not carry meaning. Consider ‘that’ in the sentence
‘John thinks that Mary is smart’. What real word semantic information
does ‘that’ encode? It’s not a tense marker. It’s not an indication of
whether or not the event is in progress or iterative. It’s not a plurality
marker or any other such semantically linked grammatical device. As a
word, there is nothing you can point to in the world or describe and say
“that’s a ‘that’” as you might with “that’s a cow” and “that’s love.” It
has a grammatical function, to be sure—to link two sentences (i.e.,
introduce an embedded clause) but it doesn’t encode any semantic
information.
 What Counts as Evidence?
It is probably clear that only data gathered during comprehension-
oriented research is appropriate for making inferences about IP.

Book 1
Typical research designs include sentence interpretation tasks and
eye tracking experimentation.

Sentence Interpretation Tasks

Book 2
In this kind of experimentation, participants hear sentences and
indicate what they understand. For example, in the case of word
order, participants might hear
 Eye-tracking
Eye-tracking research involves having participants read sentences or
text on a computer screen while tiny cameras track eye-pupil
movements via a very small infrared light directed at their
pupils. As people read, they unconsciously skip words and parts
of words, regress to some words, and so on, on a millisecond-
by-millisecond basis (see Keating, 2013, for an overview of eye-
tracking research in L2).
 Common Misunderstandings

IP is a model of acquisition..
Input processing is
equivalent to “noticing

Input processing discounts

a role for output,
Input processing is a social factors, and
meaning-based approach to Input processing is a
other matters.
studying acquisi- tion and pedagogical
ignores what we know about approach. Some
syntactic processes. people believe
 Thanks!
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