Chapter Four  Psychological Aspects of SLA

Just like linguistics, psychology has greatly influenced the study of second language acquisition. In this chapter, we will survey a few approaches to second language acquisition in terms of pscholinguistic processing rather than the structure of linguistic products. We will first review language and brain. Second, we move to the behaviorist way of L2 learning. Then, we will focus on the cognitive perspective of language learning, such as information processing, connectionist/emergentist models, and competition model (CM). Finally, we will discuss individual differences and different kinds of learning strategies.

 

4.1 Language and the brain

An interesting area of inquiry in SLA is the study of the function of the brain in the process of acquisition. Early in the 19^th century, there were notions that certain parts of the brain may be specialized for language functions. For example, French surgeon Paul Broca (1861, 1865) observed that an area (later called “Broca area”) in the left frontal lobe seemed to be responsible for the ability to speak. An injury to this part of the brain will lead to extreme difficulty in producing speech. Such a patient has to make great efforts to produce a sentence. He uses distorted articulation, and most typically, fails to use functional morphemes. If the impairment is very serious, he may forget word sequence. For example, a patient with this disease once described the breakfast he had by saying I eggs and eat and drink coffee breakfast. A German doctor, Carl Wernicke (1874) further identified a nearby area (named Wernicke’s area), which is central to language processing. If one suffers from a language disorder called Wernicke’s aphasia, his semantic and pragmatic ability will be robbed. Any large destruction in this area results in the loss of understanding and the ability to make meaningful speech. For example, some patients of Wernicke’s aphasia speak fluently, but their words are difficult to understand, with general terms conveying little meaning, such as I don’t know what’s happened to that, but it’s taken that out. That is mm there without doing it, the thing that are being done…. Although some exceptions have been found, language is represented primarily in the left hemisphere of the brain including both Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area.

Specialization of the two halves of the brain is called lateralization. As a child’s brain matures, different functions became lateralized to the left or right hemisphere. For example, the left hemisphere is associated with logical, analytical thought, with mathematical and linear processing of information; the right hemisphere is related to the perception and memory of visual, tactile, and auditory images, and is more efficient in the processing of holistic, integrative, and emotional information. The characteristics of each hemisphere are listed in Table 4.1:

 

Table 4.1: Left and right brain characteristics

Left-brain dominance                     Right-brain dominance

Intellectual                           Intuitive

Remembers names                         Remembers faces

Responds to verbal instructions and            Responds to demonstrated, illustrated

explanations                           or symbolic instructions

Experiments systematically and               Experiments randomly and with

  with control                         less restraint

Makes objective judgments                  Makes subjective judgments

Planned and structured                    Fluid and spontaneous

Prefers established, certain information       Prefers elusive, uncertain information

Analytic reader                        Synthesizing reader

Reliance on language in thinking and           Reliance on images in thinking and

  remembering                           remembering

Prefers talking and writing                Prefers drawing and manipulating objects

Prefers multiple choice tests               Prefers open-ended questions

Controls feelings                        More free with feelings

Not good at interpreting body language          Good at interpreting body language

Rarely uses metaphors                    Frequently uses metaphors

Favors logical problem solving                 Favors intuitive problem solving

 

The specialization increases as the brain matures and becomes less plastic. That is to say, if one area of the brain is damaged, it becomes less able to perform the functions of another. As suggested by Lenneberg (Brown, 2002:54), lateralization is a slow process that begins around the age of 2 and is completed around puberty. During this time the child is neurologically assigning functions little by little to one side of the brain or the other. Language is one of these functions. And it has been found that when children up to the age of puberty suffer injury to the left hemisphere, they are able to re-localize language functions to the right hemisphere, to “relearn” the first language with little impairment. It is the brain plasticity in childhood that would allow other areas to take over the language functions of the damaged areas. However, beyond a certain age, normal language would be impossible. This is so-called Critical Period Hypothesis, which is to be discussed below in relation to the influence of age on the second language acquisition.

These findings were extended to propose a relationship between lateralization and second language acquisition. As suggested by Scovel (1969), plasticity of the brain prior to puberty enables children to acquire not only the L1, but also an L2. Also, it is the very accomplishment of lateralization that makes it difficult for learners to acquire fluent control of an L2. In other words, it is possible that there is a critical period not only for first language acquisition, but also for second language acquisition.

However, another branch of neurolinguistic research focused on the role of the right hemisphere in the acquisition of an L2. For example, Obler (1981) notes that in L2 learning, there is significant right hemisphere participation and that “this participation is particularly active during the early stages of learning the second language.” (Brown, 2002: 55) Obler cites the strategy of guessing at meanings, and of using formulaic utterances, as examples of right hemisphere activity. In contrast to left-brain-dominant type of L2 learning, which is better at producing separate words, gathering the specifics of language, carrying out sequences of operations, and dealing with abstraction, classification, labeling, and reorganization, right-brain-dominant type of learning appear to deal better with whole images, with generalizations, with metaphors, and with emotional reactions and artistic expressions.