Plenaries
Ellen Bialystok, York University, Canada
Plenary Title: How analysis and control lead to advantages and disadvantages in bilingual processing
Abstract
The experience of lifelong bilingualism has been shown to lead to both advantages is nonverbal cognitive control and disadvantages in lexical access. These apparently contradictory consequences have typically been explained through separate models that use different explanatory mechanisms for each outcome. I will argue that the two outcomes are in fact consequences of a single system. The need to control attention to two language systems both enhances the domain-general systems for selection and conflict resolution, part of executive functioning, and challenges lexical access through the need to incorporate these high resource systems for ordinary language production. The argument will be illustrated by means of a study examining a time-course analysis of word production in a verbal fluency task. Monolinguals and bilinguals who differ in levels of formal language proficiency demonstrate an effect of language knowledge by means of the number of words they produce in an initial burst and an effect of language experience by means of the rate of production of words over time. These results are used to support a model based on two central processes that can roughly be called representation (analysis) and control (executive processing).
Nick Ellis, University of Michigan
Plenary Title: Implicit and Explicit SLA and their Interface
Abstract
The first part of this paper concerns the ways in which language acquisition involves implicit learning from naturalistic usage. Psycholinguistic analyses demonstrate that fluent language users are exquisitely sensitive to the relative probabilities of occurrence of different constructions in the speech stream and their most likely interpretations in context. Such frequency effects provide clear testament of usage-based acquisition. Implicit learning provides a distributional analysis, tallying the occurrence of constructions, generalizing schemata from conspiracies of memorized utterances, and forging composites by chunking. These processes provide optimal solutions to the problem spaces of form-function mappings and their contextualized use.
Yet however necessary in rational fluency, these incidentals are not sufficient. Many aspects of second language are unlearnable from implicit processes alone. The “Basic Variety” typical of untutored L2A is usually considerably below what a child achieves in L1. Implicit learning does not suffice. SLA research suggests positive effects of explicit instruction and explicit learning, and high levels of adult attainment usually requires these.
Explicit and implicit knowledge are distinct and dissociated; they involve different types of representation and are substantiated in separate parts of the brain. Nevertheless, they do interact. Questions concerning their interface have lain at the heart of applied linguistic theory for 30 years or more. Our answers to these questions affect the ways we approach language acquisition, the ways we interact with learners, and whether and how we plan instruction.
This paper reviews various psychological and neurological processes by which explicit knowledge of form-meaning associations impacts upon implicit language learning. The interface is dynamic: It happens transiently during conscious processing, but the influence upon implicit cognition endures thereafter.
Arthur S. Reber, Brooklyn College
Plenary Title: A few oft-unacknowledged aspects of implicit learning --- with, perhaps, some novel ways to think about L1 and L2 acquisition
Abstract
An Epitaph for Grammar
It has been some forty plus years since Chomsky initiated a revolution in linguistics. While considerable progress has been made in psycholinguistics, pragmatics, semantics and a host of allied fields such as speech synthesis, automatic translation and voice recognition, there has been surprisingly little in theoretical syntactic theory that was the heart of Chomsky's initial program and little direct evidence to support the larger model. The reasons for this are, I believe, quite straightforward and, while suspected by some, have not to my knowledge been articulated publicly and clearly. They are (1) there is no such entity as Universal Grammar, (2) there is, in fact, no such thing as a Generative Grammar of any natural language, and (3) there is no language organ or any biological structure that serves to guide language acquisition. In short, the Chomskyan revolution was founded on three fundamental principles, all of which are false. The search for Universal Grammar has been a search for a will-'o-the-wisp. The models of generative grammar that have been produced are largely irrelevant to language as it is spoken and understood. The assumption of a language acquisition device is based on faulty notions of neurocognitive functions and some difficult to defend notions about evolution. Instead we should focus on language as a communication system, not as a sequence of verbal forms that obey some abstract "grammar."
Bill VanPatten, Texas Tech University
Plenary Title: Stubborn Syntax: How it Resists Explicit Learning
Abstract
The implicit/explicit learning debate in SLA has suffered from both methodological and conceptual problems (e.g., Hulstijn, 2005). In this talk, I will focus on one of the conceptual problems: the nature of language. A good deal of research on explicit and implicit learning has dealt with surface features of language while looking at dichotomies such as easy/hard rules, regularities/irregularities, vocabulary/grammar, among others (e.g. deGraff, 1996; N. Ellis, 2005; Hulstijn, 1995; Robinson, 1996, 2005). In this talk, I take a generative perspective looking at language as the instantiation of universal principles and parameters in a given language that form an implicit mental representation.
My main point is this: within a generative perspective, syntax cannot be learned explicitly; it can only be derived implicitly from the interaction of universal grammar (UG) and the processed exemplars in the input (e.g., Schwartz, 1993; Truscott & Sharwood Smith, 2004; VanPatten, 1996). Because the interaction of UG with processed data happens outside of awareness, this interaction is not subject to explicit learning. I will also touch upon L1 transfer as in implicit process and also the relationship between the possible explicit learning of surface elements (e.g., morphological properties, lexical form) and the implicit learning of syntax.
Michael Ullman, Georgetown University
Plenary Title: Declarative and procedural memory in first and second language
Abstract
Neurocognitive evidence on first and second language learning and processing, and their relations to the declarative and procedural memory brain systems, will be presented, including data from psycholinguistic, neurological, and neuroimaging studies. New evidence from experiments examining the neurocognitive effects of explicit versus implicit language training will be discussed.