A Summary of Stephen Krashen's "Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition" By Reid Wilson First appeared: Language Learning

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Bibliographic information: Krashen, Stephen D. 1981. Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. English Language Teaching series. London: Prentice-Hall International (UK) Ltd. 202 pages. Quote that captures the essense of the book: "What theory implies, quite simply, is that language acquisition, first or second, occurs when comprehension of real messages occurs, and when the acquirer is not 'on the defensive'... Language acquisition does not require extensive use of conscious grammatical rules, and does not require tedious drill. It does not occur overnight, however. Real language acquisition develops slowly, and speaking skills emerge significantly later than listening skills, even when conditions are perfect. The best methods are therefore those that supply 'comprehensible input' in low anxiety situations, containing messages that students really want to hear. These methods do not force early production in the second language, but allow students to produce when they are 'ready', recognizing that improvement comes from supplying communicative and comprehensible input, and not from forcing and correcting production." (6-7) Summary of Part I. Introduction: The Relationship of Theory to Practice In deciding how to develop language teaching methods and materials, one can take three approaches: make use of second language acquisition theory, make use of applied linguistics research, and make use of ideas and intuition from experience. These approaches should in fact support each other and lead to common conclusions. This book incorporates all three approaches, with a hope of reintroducing theory to language teachers. While "most current theory may still not be the final word on second language acquisition," it is hoped that teachers will use the ideas in this book as another source alongside of their classroom and language-learning experiences. Summary of Part II. Second Language Acquisition Theory There are five key hypotheses about second language acquisition: 1. THE ACQUISITION-LEARNING DISCTINCTION Adults have two different ways to develop compentence in a language: language acquisition and language learning. Language acquisition is a subconscious process not unlike the way a child learns language. Language acquirers are not consciously aware of the grammatical rules of the language, but rather develop a "feel" for correctness. "In non-technical language, acquisition is 'picking-up' a language."

Language learning, on the other hand, refers to the "concious knowledge of a second language, knowing the rules, being aware of them, and being able to talk about them." Thus language learning can be compared to learning about a language. The acquistion-learning disctinction hypothesis claims that adults do not lose the ability to acquire languages the way that children do. Just as research shows that error correction has little effect on children learning a first language, so too error correction has little affect on language acquisition. 2. THE NATURAL ORDER HYPOTHESIS The natural order hypothesis states that "the acquisition of grammatical structures proceeds in a predictable order." For a given language, some grammatical structures tend to be acquired early, others late, regardless of the first language of a speaker. However, as will be discussed later on in the book, this does not mean that grammar should be taught in this natural order of acquisition. 3. THE MONITOR HYPOTHESIS The language that one has subconsciously acquired "initiates our utterances in a second language and is responsible for our fluency," whereas the language that we have consciously learned acts as an editor in situations where the learner has enough time to edit, is focused on form, and knows the rule, such as on a grammar test in a language classroom or when carefully writing a composition. This conscious editor is called the Monitor. Different individuals use their monitors in different ways, with different degrees of success. Monitor Over-users try to always use their Monitor, and end up "so concerned with correctness that they cannot speak with any real fluency." Monitor Under-users either have not consciously learned or choose to not use their conscious knowledge of the language. Although error correction by others has little influence on them, they can often correct themelves based on a "feel" for correctness. Teachers should aim to produce Optimal Monitor users, who "use the Monitor when it is appropriate and when it does not interfere with communication." They do not use their conscious knowledge of grammar in normal conversation, but will use it in writing and planned speech. "Optimal Monitor users can therefore use their learned competence as a supplement to their acquired competence." 4. THE INPUT HYPOTHESIS The input hypothesis answers the question of how a language acquirer develops comptency over time. It states that a language acquirer who is at "level i" must receive comprehensible input that is at "level i+1." "We acquire, in other words, only when we understand language that contains structure that is 'a little beyond' where we are now." This understanding is possible due to using the context of the language we are hearing or reading and our knowledge of the world. However, instead of aiming to receive input that is exactly at our i+1 level, or instead of having a teacher aim to teach us grammatical structure that is at our i+1 level, we should instead just focus on communication that is understandable. If we do this, and if we get enough of that kind of input, then we will in effect be receiving and thus acquiring out i+1. "Prduction ability emerges. It is not taught directly." Evidences for the input hypothesis can be found in the effectiveness of caretaker speech from an adult to a child, of teacher-talk from a teacher to a language student, and of foreigner-talk from a sympathetic conversation partner to a language learner/acquirer.

One result of this hypothesis is that language students should be given a initial "silent period" where they are building up acquired competence in a language before they begin to produce it. Whenever language acquirers try to produce language beyond what they have acquired, they tend to use the rules they have already acquired from their first language, thus allowing them to communicate but not really progress in the second language. 5. THE AFFECTIVE FILTER HYPOTHESIS Motivation, self-confidence, and anxiety all affect language acquisition, in effect raising or lowering the "stickiness" or "penetration" of any comprehensible input that is received. These five hypotheses of second language acquisition can be summarized: "1. Acquisition is more important than learning. 2. In order to acquire, two conditions are necessaary. The first is comprehensible (or even better, comprehended) input containing i+1, structures a bit beyond the acquier's current level, and second, a low or weak affective filter to allow the input 'in'." In view of these findings, question is raised: does classroom language teaching help? Classroom teaching helps when it provides the necessary comprehensible input to those students who are not at a level yet which allows them to receive comprehensible input from "the real world" or who do not have access to "real world" language speakers. It can also help when it provides students communication tools to make better use of the outside world, and it can provide beneficial conscious learning for optimal Monitor users. Various research studies have been done comparing the amount of language competance and the amount of exposure to the language either in classroom-years or length of residence, the age of the language acquirer, and the acculturation of the language acquirer. The results of these studies are consistent with the above acquisition hypotheses: the more comprehensible input one receives in low-stress situations, the more language competance that one will have. Summary of Part III: Providing Input for Acquisition Once it is realized that receiving comprehensible input is central to acquiring a second language, questions are immediately raised concerning the nature and sources of this type of input and the role of the second language classroom. To what extent is the second language classroom beneficial? Classrooms help when they provide the comprehensible input that the acquirer is going to receive. If acquirers have access to real world input, and if their current ability allows them understand at least some of it, then the classroom is not nearly as significant. An informal, immersion environment has the opportunity to provide tons of input; however, that input is not always comprehensible to a beginner, and often for an adult beginner the classroom is better than the real world in providing comprehensible input. However, for the intermediate level student and above, living and interacting in an environment in which the language is spoken will likely prove to be better for the student, especially considering the fact that a language classroom will not be able to reflect the broad range of language use that the real world provides. The classroom's goal is to prepare students to be able to understand the language used outside the classroom. What role does speaking (output) play in second language acquisition? It has no direct role, since language is acquired by comprehensible input, and in fact someone who is not able to speak for physical

reasons can still acquire the full ability to understand language. However, speaking does indirectly help in two ways: 1) speaking produces conversation, which produces comprehensible input, and 2) your speaking allows native speakers to judge what level you are at and then adjust their speak downward to you, providing you input that is more easily understood. What kind of input is optimal for acquisition? The best input is comprehensible, which sometimes means that it needs to be slower and more carefully articulated, using common vocabulary, less slang, and shorter sentences. Optimal input is interesting and/or relevant and allows the acquirer to focus on the meaning of the message and not on the form of the message. Optimal input is not grammatically sequenced, and a grammatical syllabus should not be used in the language classroom, in part because all students will not be at exactly the same level and because each structure is often only introduced once before moving on to something else. Finally, optimal input must focus on quantity, although most language teachers have to date seriously underestimated how much comprehensible input is actually needed for an acquirer to progress. In addition to receiving the right kind of input, students should have their affective filter kept low, meaning that classroom stress should be minimized and students "should not be put on the defensive." One result of this is that student's errors should not be corrected. Students should be taught how to gain more input from the outside world, including helping them acquire conversational competence, the means of managing conversation. Summary of Part IV: The Role of Grammar, or Putting Grammar in its Place "As should be apparent by now, the position taken in this book is that second language teaching should focus on encouraging acquisition, on providing input that stimulates the subconscious language acquisition potential all normal human beings have. This does not mean to say, however, that there is no room at all for conscious learning. Conscious learning does have a role, but it is no longer the lead actor in the play." For starters, we must realize that learning does not turn into acquisition. While the idea that we first learn a grammar rule and then use it so much that it becomes internalized is common and may seem obvious to many, it is not supported by theory nor by the observation of second language acquirers, who often correctly use "rules" they have never been taught and don't even remember accurately the rules they have learned. However, there is a place for grammar, or the conscious learning of the rules of a language. Its major role is in the use of the Monitor, which allows Monitor users to produce more correct output when they are given the right conditions to actually use their Monitor, as in some planned speech and writing. However, for correct Monitor use the users must know the rules they are applying, and these would need to be rules that are easy to remember and apply--a very small subset of all of the grammatical rules of a language. It is not worthwhile for language acquisition to teach difficult rules which are hard to learn, harder to remember, and sometimes almost impossible to correctly apply. For many years there was controversy in language-teaching literature on whether grammar should be deductively or inductively taught. However, as both of these methods involve language learning and not language acquisition, this issue should not be central for language teaching practice. There has similarly been controversy as to whether or not errors should be corrected in language learners' speech. Second language acquisition theory suggests that errors in ordinary conversation and Monitor-free situations should not be corrected, and that errors should only be corrected when they apply to easy to apply and understand grammatical rules in situations where known Monitor-users are able to use their Monitor.

There is a second way in which the teaching of grammar in a classroom can be helpful, and that is when the students are interested in learning about the language they are acquiring. This language appreciation, or linguistics, however, will only result in language acquisition when grammar is taught in the language that is being acquired, and it is actually the comprehensible input that the students are receiving, not the content of the lecture itself, that is aiding acquisition. "This is a subtle point. In effect, both teachers and students are deceiving themselves. They believe that it is the subject matter itself, the study of grammar, that is responsible for the students' progress in second language acquisition, but in reality their progress is coming from the medium and not the message. And subject matter that held their interest would do just as well, so far as second language acquisition is concerned, as long as it required extensive use of the target language." And perhaps many students would be more interested in a different subject matter and would thus acquire more than they would in such a grammar-based classroom. Summary of Part V: Approaches to Language Teaching Popular language teaching methods today include grammar-translation, audio-lingualism, cognitive-code, the direct method, the natural approach, total physical response, and Suggestopedia. How do these methods fare when they are evaluated by Second Language Acquisition theory? Each method will be evaluated using the following criteria: Requirements for optimal input -- comprehensible -- interesting/relevant -- not grammatically sequenced - quantity -- low filter level -- provides tools for conversational management Learning restricted to: -- Rules that are easily learned and applied, and not acquired yet -- Monitor users -Situations when the learner has adequate time and a focus on form 1. GRAMMAR-TRANSLATION Grammar-translation usually consists of an explanation of a grammatical rule, with some example sentences, a bilingual vocabulary list, a reading section exemplifying the grammatical rule and incorporating the vocabulary, and exercises to practice using the grammar and vocabulary. Most of these classes are taught in the student's first language. The grammar-translation method provides little opportunity for acquisition and relies too heavily on learning. 2. AUDIO-LINGUALISM An audio-lingual lesson usually begins with a dialogue which contains the grammar and vocabulary to be focused on in the lesson. The students mimic the dialogue and eventually memorize it. After the dialogue comes pattern drills, in which the grammatical structure introduced in the dialogue is reinforced, with these drills focusing on simple repetition, substitution, transformation, and translation. While the audiolingual method provides opportunity for some acquisition to occur, it cannot measure up to newer methods which provide much more comprehensible input in a low-filter environment. 3. COGNITIVE-CODE Cognitive-code is similar to grammar-translation except that it focuses on developing all four skills of language: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Communicative competence is focused upon. Since the cognitive-code approach provides more comprehensible input than grammar-translation does, it should produce more acquisition, but other newer methods provide even more and have better results. Learning is overemphasized with this method.

4. THE DIRECT METHOD Several approaches have been called the "direct method"; the approach evaluated here involves all discussion in the target language. The teacher uses examples of language in order to inductively teach grammar; students are to try to guess the rules of the language by the examples provided. Teachers interact with the students a lot, asking them questions about relevant topics and trying to use the grammatical structure of the day in the conversation. Accuracy is sought and errors are corrected. This method provides more comprehensible input than the methods discussed so far, but it still focuses too much on grammar. 5. THE NATURAL APPROACH In the Natural Approach the teacher speaks only the target language and class time is committed to providing input for acquisition. Students may use either the language being taught or their first language. Errors in speech are not corrected, however homework may include grammar exercises that will be corrected. Goals for the class emphasize the students being able use the language "to talk about ideas, perform tasks, and solve problems." This approach aims to fulfill the requirements for learning and acquisition, and does a great job in doing it. Its main weakness is that all classroom teaching is to some degree limited in its ability to be interesting and relevant to all students. 6. TOTAL PHYSICAL RESPONSE Total Physical Response, or TPR, involves the students listening and responding to commands given by the teacher such as "sit down" and "walk," with the complexity of the commands growing over time as the class acquires more language. Student speech is delayed, and once students indicate a willingness to talk they initially give commands to other students. Theory predicts that TPR should result in substantial language acquisition. Its content may not be always interesting and relevant for the students, but should produce better results than the audio-lingual and grammar-translation methods. 7. SUGGESTOPEDIA Suggestopedia classes are small and intensive, and focus on providing a very low-stress, attractive environment (partly involving active and passive "seances" complete with music and meditation) in which acquisition can occur. Some of the students' first language is used at the beginning, but most in the target language. The role of the teacher is very important in creating the right atmosphere and in acting out the dialogues that form the core of the content. Suggestopedia seems to provide close to optimal input while not giving too much emphasis to grammar. What does applied linguistics research have to say about these methods? Applied research has examined the older methods of grammar-translation, audio-lingual, and cognitive-code much more than it has looked at the newer methods. There seems to be only small differences in the results of the older methods. While much research remains to be done, Total Physical Response and the other newer approaches "produce significantly better results than old approaches." So what is better, the classroom or the real world? "Quite simply, the role of the second or foreign language classroom is to bring a student to a point where he can begin to use the outside would for further second language acquisition.... This means we have to provide students with enough comprehensible input to bring their second language competence to the point where they can begin to understand language heard 'on the outside'.... In other words, all second language classes are transitional."

In the real world, conversations with sympathetic native speakers who are willing to help the acquirer understand are very helpful. These native speakers engage in what is called "foreigner talk," not very different from the way that a parent would talk to a child. Voluntary pleasure reading is also beneficial for second language acquisition, especially as the reader is free to choose reading material that is of interest and the proper level in order to be understood. Taking content classes in the language that is being acquired can also be helpful to the more advanced learner, especially when the class is composed of students who are all acquiring the second language. How does all of the above affect our views on achievement testing? As students will gear their studying to the type of tests they expect to take, the kinds of language tests that are given is very important. "Achievement tests...should meet this requirement: preparation for the test, or studying for the test, should obviously encourage the student to do things that will provide more comprehensible input and the tools to gain even more input when the class is over." With this in mind, general reading comprehension tests are helpful, as would be a test that would encourage students to participate in conversations and employ the tools of communicative competence. Assuming that the conclusions in this book are correct, many new classroom language materials need to be developed. These materials should focus on providing much comprehensible input to beginning and intermediate students and should provide them with the means to gain even more input outside the classroom. Such materials should only focus on grammatical rules that are easy to learn and apply. Readers should have much more reading material in them and much fewer exercises and should have enough content that students can choose which topics to read about. A quote from the conclusion: "Even if the theory presented here is totally correct, and my suggestions for application are in fact the appropriate ones, there are some serious problems that need to be mentioned before concluding. These have to do with the acceptance, by teachers and students, of language acquisition as primary, and comprehensible input as the means of encouraging language acquisition. These problems are caused by the fact that acquisition differs from learning in two major ways: acquisition is slow and subtle, while learning is fast and, for some people, obvious.... I think that I have presented a conservative view of language acquisition theory and its applications, conservative in the sense that it attempts to be consistent with all empirical data that are known to me. It is consistent with the way thousands of people have acquired second languages throughout history, and in many cases acquired them very well. They acquired second languages while they were focused on something else, while they were gaining interesting or needed information, or interacting with people they liked to be with." http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/rw/krashenbk.htm http://sdkrashen.com/Principles_and_Practice/Principles_and_Practice.pdf Language Acquisition Steven Pinker Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Chapter to appear in L. R. Gleitman, M. Liberman, and D. N. Osherson (Eds.), An Invitation to Cognitive Science, 2nd Ed. Volume 1: Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. NONFINAL VERSION: PLEASE DO NOTE QUOTE. Preparation of the chapter was supported by NIH grant HD 18381 and NSF grant BNS 91-09766, and by the McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT. 1 Introduction Language acquisition is one of the central topics in cognitive science. Every theory of cognition has tried to explain it; probably no other topic has aroused such controversy. Possessing a language is the quintessentially human trait: all normal humans speak, no nonhuman animal does. Language is the main vehicle by which we know about other people's thoughts, and the two must be intimately related. Every time we speak we are revealing something about language, so the facts of language structure are easy to come by; these data hint at a system of extraordinary complexity. Nonetheless, learning a first language is something every child does successfully, in a matter of a few years and without the need for formal lessons. With language so close to the core of what it means to be human, it is not surprising that children's acquisition of language has received so much attention. Anyone with strong views about the human mind would like to show that children's first few steps are steps in the right direction. Language acquisition is not only inherently interesting; studying it is one way to look for concrete answers to questions that permeate cognitive science: Modularity. Do children learn language using a "mental organ," some of whose principles of organization are not shared with other cognitive systems such as perception, motor control, and reasoning (Chomsky, 1975, 1991; Fodor, 1983)? Or is language acquisition just another problem to be solved by general intelligence, in this case, the problem of how to communicate with other humans over the auditory channel (Putnam, 1971; Bates, 1989)? Human Uniqueness. A related question is whether language is unique to humans. At first glance the answer seems obvious. Other animals communication with a fixed repertoire of symbols, or with analogue variation like the mercury in a thermometer. But none appears to have the combinatorial rule system of human language, in which symbols are permuted into an unlimited set of combinations, each with a determinate meaning. On the other hand, many other claims about human uniqueness, such as that humans were the only animals to use tools or to fabricate them, have turned out to be false. Some researchers have thought that apes have the capacity for language but never profited from a humanlike cultural milieu in which language was taught, and they have thus tried to teach apes language-like systems. Whether they have succeeded, and whether human children are really "taught" language themselves, are questions we will soon come to. Language and Thought. Is language simply grafted on top of cognition as a way of sticking communicable labels onto thoughts (Fodor, 1975; Piaget, 1926)? Or does learning a language somehow mean learning to think in that language? A famous hypothesis, outlined by Benjamin Whorf (1956), asserts that the categories and relations that we use to understand the world come from our particular language, so that speakers of different languages conceptualize the world in different ways. Language acquisition, then, would be learning to think, not just learning to talk. This is an intriguing hypothesis, but virtually all modern cognitive scientists believe it is false (see Pinker, 1994a). Babies can think before they can talk (Chapter X). Cognitive psychology has shown that people think not just in words but in images (see Chapter X) and abstract logical propositions (see the chapter by

Larson). And linguistics has shown that human languages are too ambiguous and schematic to use as a medium of internal computation: when people think about "spring," surely they are not confused as to whether they are thinking about a season or something that goes "boing" -- and if one word can correspond to two thoughts, thoughts can't be words. But language acquisition has a unique contribution to make to this issue. As we shall see, it is virtually impossible to show how children could learn a language unless you assume they have a considerable amount of nonlinguistic cognitive machinery in place before they start. Learning and Innateness. All humans talk but no house pets or house plants do, no matter how pampered, so heredity must be involved in language. But a child growing up in Japan speaks Japanese whereas the same child brought up in California would speak English, so the environment is also crucial. Thus there is no question about whether heredity or environment is involved in language, or even whether one or the other is "more important." Instead, language acquisition might be our best hope of finding out how heredity and environment interact. We know that adult language is intricately complex, and we know that children become adults. Therefore something in the child's mind must be capable of attaining that complexity. Any theory that posits too little innate structure, so that its hypothetical child ends up speaking something less than a real language, must be false. The same is true for any theory that posits too much innate structure, so that the hypothetical child can acquire English but not, say, Bantu or Vietnamese. And not only do we know about the output of language acquisition, we know a fair amount about the input to it, namely, parent's speech to their children. So even if language acquisition, like all cognitive processes, is essentially a "black box," we know enough about its input and output to be able to make precise guesses about its contents. The scientific study of language acquisition began around the same time as the birth of cognitive science, in the late 1950's. We can see now why that is not a coincidence. The historical catalyst was Noam Chomsky's review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior (Chomsky, 1959). At that time, Anglo-American natural science, social science, and philosophy had come to a virtual consensus about the answers to the questions listed above. The mind consisted of sensorimotor abilities plus a few simple laws of learning governing gradual changes in an organism's behavioral repertoire. Therefore language must be learned, it cannot be a module, and thinking must be a form of verbal behavior, since verbal behavior is the prime manifestation of "thought" that can be observed externally. Chomsky argued that language acquisition falsified these beliefs in a single stroke: children learn languages that are governed by highly subtle and abstract principles, and they do so without explicit instruction or any other environmental clues to the nature of such principles. Hence language acquisition depends on an innate, species-specific module that is distinct from general intelligence. Much of the debate in language acquisition has attempted to test this once-revolutionary, and still controversial, collection of ideas. The implications extend to the rest of human cognition. 2 The Biology of Language Acquisition Human language is made possible by special adaptations of the human mind and body that occurred in the course of human evolution, and which are put to use by children in acquiring their mother tongue. 2.1 Evolution of Language Most obviously, the shape of the human vocal tract seems to have been modified in evolution for the demands of speech. Our larynxes are low in our throats, and our vocal tracts have a sharp right angle bend

that creates two independently-modifiable resonant cavities (the mouth and the pharynx or throat) that defines a large two-dimensional range of vowel sounds (see the chapter by Liberman). But it comes at a sacrifice of efficiency for breathing, swallowing, and chewing (Lieberman, 1984). Before the invention of the Heimlich maneuver, choking on food was a common cause of accidental death in humans, causing 6,000 deaths a year in the United States. The evolutionary selective advantages for language must have been very large to outweigh such a disadvantage. It is tempting to think that if language evolved by gradual Darwinian natural selection, we must be able to find some precursor of it in our closest relatives, the chimpanzees. In several famous and controversial demonstrations, chimpanzees have been taught some hand-signs based on American Sign Language, to manipulate colored switches or tokens, and to understand some spoken commands (Gardner & Gardner, 1969; Premack & Premack, 1983; Savage-Rumbaugh, 1991). Whether one wants to call their abilities "language" is not really a scientific question, but a matter of definition: how far we are willing to stretch the meaning of the word "language". The scientific question is whether the chimps' abilities are homologous to human language -- that is, whether the two systems show the same basic organization owing to descent from a single system in their common ancestor. For example, biologists don't debate whether the wing-like structures of gliding rodents may be called "genuine wings" or something else (a boring question of definitions). It's clear that these structures are not homologous to the wings of bats, because they have a fundamentally different anatomical plan, reflecting a different evolutionary history. Bats' wings are modifications of the hands of the common mammalian ancestor; flying squirrels' wings are modifications of its rib cage. The two structures are merely analogous: similar in function. Though artificial chimp signaling systems have some analogies to human language (e.g., use in communication, combinations of more basic signals), it seems unlikely that they are homologous. Chimpanzees require massive regimented teaching sequences contrived by humans to acquire quite rudimentary abilities, mostly limited to a small number of signs, strung together in repetitive, quasirandom sequences, used with the intent of requesting food or tickling (Terrace, Petitto, Sanders, & Bever, 1979; Seidenberg & Petitto, 1979, 1987; Seidenberg, 1986; Wallman, 1992; Pinker, 1994a). This contrasts sharply with human children, who pick up thousands of words spontaneously, combine them in structured sequences where every word has a determinate role, respect the word order of the adult language, and use sentences for a variety of purposes such as commenting on interesting objects. This lack of homology does not, by the way, cast doubt on a gradualistic Darwinian account of language evolution. Humans did not evolve directly from chimpanzees. Both derived from common ancestor, probably around 6-7 million years ago. This leaves about 300,000 generations in which language could have evolved gradually in the lineage leading to humans, after it split off from the lineage leading to chimpanzees. Presumably language evolved in the human lineage for two reasons: our ancestors developed technology and knowledge of the local environment in their lifetimes, and were involved in extensive reciprocal cooperation. This allowed them to benefit by sharing hard-won knowledge with their kin and exchanging it with their neighbors (Pinker & Bloom, 1990). 2.2 Dissociations between Language and General Intelligence Humans evolved brain circuitry, mostly in the left hemisphere surrounding the sylvian fissure, that appears to be designed for language, though how exactly their internal wiring gives rise to rules of language is unknown (see the Chapter by Zurif). The brain mechanisms underlying language are not just those allowing us to be smart in general. Strokes often leave adults with catastrophic losses in language (see the Chapter by Zurif, and Pinker, 1994a), though not necessarily impaired in other aspects of

intelligence, such as those measured on the nonverbal parts of IQ tests. Similarly, there is an inherited set of syndromes called Specific Language Impairment (Gopnik and Crago, 1993; Tallal, Ross, & Curtiss, 1989) which is marked by delayed onset of language, difficulties in articulation in childhood, and lasting difficulties in understanding, producing, and judging grammatical sentences. By definition, Specifically Language Impaired people show such deficits despite the absence of cognitive problems like retardation, sensory problems like hearing loss, or social problems like autism. More interestingly, there are syndromes showing the opposite dissociation, where intact language coexists with severe retardation. These cases show that language development does not depend on fully functioning general intelligence. One example comes from children with Spina Bifida, a malformation of the vertebrae that leaves the spinal cord unprotected, often resulting in hydrocephalus, an increase in pressure in the cerebrospinal fluid filling the ventricles (large cavities) of the brain, distending the brain from within. Hydrocephalic children occasionally end up significantly retarded but can carry on long, articulate, and fully grammatical conversations, in which they earnestly recount vivid events that are, in fact, products of their imaginations (Cromer, 1992; Curtiss, 1989; Pinker, 1994a). Another example is Williams Syndrome, an inherited condition involving physical abnormalities, significant retardation (the average IQ is about 50), incompetence at simple everyday tasks (tying shoelaces, finding one's way, adding two numbers, and retrieving items from a cupboard), social warmth and gregariousness, and fluent, articulate language abilities (Bellugi, et al., 1990). 2.3 Maturation of the Language System As the chapter by Newport and Gleitman suggests, the maturation of language circuits during a child's early years may be a driving force underlying the course of language acquisition (Pinker, 1994, Chapter 9; Bates, Thal, & Janowsky, 1992; Locke, 1992; Huttenlocher, 1990). Before birth, virtually all the neurons (nerve cells) are formed, and they migrate into their proper locations in the brain. But head size, brain weight, and thickness of the cerebral cortex (gray matter), where the synapses (junctions) subserving mental computation take place, continue to increase rapidly in the year after birth. Long-distance connections (white matter) are not complete until nine months, and they continue to grow their speedinducing myelin insulation throughout childhood. Synapses continue to develop, peaking in number between nine months and two years (depending on the brain region), at which point the child has 50% more synapses than the adult. Metabolic activity in the brain reaches adult levels by nine to ten months, and soon exceeds it, peaking around the age of four. In addition, huge numbers of neurons die in utero, and the dying continues during the first two years before leveling off at age seven. Synapses wither from the age of two through the rest of childhood and into adolescence, when the brain's metabolic rate falls back to adult levels. Perhaps linguistic milestones like babbling, first words, and grammar require minimum levels of brain size, long-distance connections, or extra synapses, particularly in the language centers of the brain. Similarly, one can conjecture that these changes are responsible for the decline in the ability to learn a language over the lifespan. The language learning circuitry of the brain is more plastic in childhood; children learn or recover language when the left hemisphere of the brain is damaged or even surgically removed (though not quite at normal levels), but comparable damage in an adult usually leads to permanent aphasia (Curtiss, 1989; Lenneberg, 1967). Most adults never master a foreign language, especially the phonology, giving rise to what we call a "foreign accent." Their development often fossilizes into permanent error patterns that no teaching or correction can undo. There are great individual differences, which depend on effort, attitudes, amount of exposure, quality of teaching, and plain talent. Many explanations have been advanced for children's superiority: they can exploit the special ways that their mothers talk them, they make errors unself-consciously, they are more motivated to communicate,

they like to conform, they are not xenophobic or set in their ways, and they have no first language to interfere. But some of these accounts are unlikely, based on what we learn about how language acquisition works later in this chapter. For example, children can learn a language without the special indulgent speech from their mothers; they make few errors; and they get no feedback for the errors they do make. And it can't be an across-the-board decline in learning. There is no evidence, for example, that learning words (as opposed to phonology or grammar) declines in adulthood. The chapter by Newport and Gleitman shows how sheer age seems to play an important role. Successful acquisition of language typically happens by 4 (as we shall see in the next section), is guaranteed for children up to the age of six, is steadily compromised from then until shortly after puberty, and is rare thereafter. Maturational changes in the brain, such as the decline in metabolic rate and number of neurons during the early school age years, and the bottoming out of the number of synapses and metabolic rate around puberty, are plausible causes. Thus, there may be a neurologically-determined "critical period" for successful language acquisition, analogous to the critical periods documented in visual development in mammals and in the acquisition of songs by some birds. 3 The Course of Language Acquisition Although scholars have kept diaries of their children's speech for over a century (Charles Darwin was one of the first), it was only after portable tape-recorders became available in the late 1950's that children's spontaneous speech began to be analyzed systematically within developmental psychology. These naturalistic studies of children's spontaneous speech have become even more accessible now that they can be put into computer files and can be disseminated and analyzed automatically (MacWhinney & Snow, 1985, 1990; MacWhinney, 1991). They are complemented by experimental methods. In production tasks, children utter sentences to describe pictures or scenes, in response to questions, or to imitate target sentences. In comprehension tasks, they listen to sentences and then point to pictures or act out events with toys. In judgement tasks, they indicate whether or which sentences provided by an experimenter sound "silly" to them. As the chapter by Werker shows, language acquisition begins very early in the human lifespan, and begins, logically enough, with the acquisition of a language's sound patterns. The main linguistic accomplishments during the first year of life are control of the speech musculature and sensitivity to the phonetic distinctions used in the parents' language. Interestingly, babies achieve these feats before they produce or understand words, so their learning cannot depend on correlating sound with meaning. That is, they cannot be listening for the difference in sound between a word they think means bit and a word they think means beet, because they have learned neither word. They must be sorting the sounds directly, somehow tuning their speech analysis module to deliver the phonemes used in their language (Kuhl, et al., 1992). The module can then serve as the front end of the system that learns words and grammar. Shortly before their first birthday, babies begin to understand words, and around that birthday, they start to produce them (see Clark, 1993; Ingram, 1989). Words are usually produced in isolation; this one-word stage can last from two months to a year. Children's first words are similar all over the planet. About half the words are for objects: food (juice, cookie, body parts (eye, nose), clothing (diaper, sock), vehicles (car, boat), toys (doll, block), household items (bottle, light, animals (dog, kitty), and people (dada, baby). There are words for actions, motions, and routines, like (up, off, open, peekaboo, eat, and go, and modifiers, like hot, allgone, more, dirty, and cold. Finally, there are routines used in social interaction, like yes, no, want, bye-bye, and hi -- a few of which, like look at that and what is that, are words in the sense of memorized chunks, though they are not single words for the adult. Children differ in how much they name objects or engage in social interaction using memorized routines, though all children do both.

Around 18 months, language changes in two ways. Vocabulary growth increases; the child begins to learn words at a rate of one every two waking hours, and will keep learning that rate or faster through adolescence (Clark, 1993; Pinker, 1994). And primitive syntax begins, with two-word strings like the following: All dry. All messy. All wet. I sit. I shut. No bed. No pee. See baby. See pretty. More cereal. More hot. Hi Calico. Other pocket. Boot off. Siren by. Mail come. Airplane allgone. Bybebye car. Our car. Papa away. Dry pants. Our car. Papa away. Dry pants. Children's two-word combinations are highly similar across cultures. Everywhere, children announce when objects appear, disappear, and move about, point out their properties and owners, comment on people doing things and seeing things, reject and request objects and activities, and ask about who, what, and where. These sequences already reflect the language being acquired: in 95% of them, the words are properly ordered (Braine, 1976; Brown, 1973; Pinker, 1984; Ingram, 1989). Even before they put words together, babies can comprehend a sentence using its syntax. For example, in one experiment, babies who spoke only in single words were seated in front of two television screens, each of which featured a pair of adults dressed up as Cookie Monster and Big Bird from Sesame Street. One screen showed Cookie Monster tickling Big Bird; the other showed Big Bird tickling Cookie Monster. A voice-over said, "OH LOOK!!! BIG BIRD IS TICKLING COOKIE MONSTER!! FIND BIG BIRD TICKLING COOKIE MONSTER!!" (Or vice-versa.) The children must have understood the meaning of the ordering of subject, verb, and object, because they looked more at the screen that depicted the sentence in the voice-over (Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 1991). Children's output seems to meet up with a bottleneck at the output end (Brown, 1973; Bloom, 1970; Pinker, 1984). Their two- and three-word utterances look like samples drawn from longer potential sentences expressing a complete and more complicated idea. Roger Brown, one of the founders of the modern study of language development, noted that although the three children he studied intensively never produced a sentence as complicated as Mother gave John lunch in the kitchen, they did produce strings containing all of its components, and in the correct order: (Brown, 1973, p. 205): Agent Action Recipient Object Location (Mother gave John lunch in the kitchen.) Mommy fix. Mommy pumpkin. Baby table. Give doggie. Put light. Put floor. I ride horsie. Tractor go floor. Give doggie paper. Put truck window. Adam put it box.

Between the late two's and mid-three's, children's language blooms into fluent grammatical conversation so rapidly that it overwhelms the researchers who study it, and no one has worked out the exact sequence. Sentence length increases steadily, and because grammar is a combinatorial system, the number of syntactic types increases exponentially, doubling every month, reaching the thousands before the third birthday (Ingram, 1989, p. 235; Brown, 1973; Limber, 1973; Pinker, 1984). For example, here are snapshots of the development of one of Brown's longitudinal subjects, Adam, in the year following his first word combinations at the age of 2 years and 3 months (Pinker, 1994a): 2;3: Play checkers. Big drum. I got horn. 2;4: See marching bear go? Screw part machine. 2;5: Now put boots on. Where wrench go? What that paper clip doing? 2;6: Write a piece a paper. What that egg doing? No, I don't want to sit seat. 2;7: Where piece a paper go? Dropped a rubber band. Rintintin don't fly, Mommy. 2;8: Let me get down with the boots on. How tiger be so healthy and fly like kite? Joshua throw like a penguin. 2;9: Where Mommy keep her pocket book? Show you something funny. 2;10: Look at that train Ursula brought. You don't have paper. Do you want little bit, Cromer? 2;11: Do want some pie on your face? Why you mixing baby chocolate? I said why not you coming in? We going turn light on so you can't - see. 3;0: I going come in fourteen minutes. I going wear that to wedding. Those are not strong mens. You dress me up like a baby elephant. 3;1: I like to play with something else. You know how to put it back together. I gon' make it like a rocket to blast off with. You want - to give me some carrots and some beans? Press the button and catch - it, sir. Why you put the pacifier in his mouth? 3;2: So it can't be cleaned? I broke my racing car. Do you know the light wents off? When it's got a flat tire it's need a go to the station. I'm going to mail this so the letter can't come off. I - want to have some espresso. Can I put my head in the mailbox so - the mailman can know where I are and put me in the mailbox? Can I - keep the screwdriver just like a carpenter keep the screwdriver? Normal children can differ by a year or more in their rate of language development, though the stages they pass through are generally the same regardless of how stretched out or compressed. Adam's language development, for example, was relatively leisurely; many children speak in complex sentences before they turn two. During the grammar explosion, children's sentences are getting not only longer but more complex, with fuller trees, because the children can embed one constituent inside another. Whereas before they might have said Give doggie paper (a three-branch Verb Phrase) and Big doggie (a two-branch Noun Phrase), they now say Give big doggie paper, with the two-branch NP embedded inside the three-branch VP. The

earlier sentences resembled telegrams, missing unstressed function words like of, the, on, and does, as well as inflections like -ed, -ing, and -s. By the 3's, children are using these function words more often than they are omitting them, many in more than 90% of the sentences that require them. A full range of sentence types flower -- questions with words like who, what and where, relative clauses, comparatives, negations, complements, conjunctions, and passives. These constructions appear to display the most, perhaps even all, of the grammatical machinery needed to account for adult grammar. Though many of the young 3-year-old's sentences are ungrammatical for one reason or another, it is because there are many things that can go wrong in any single sentence. When researchers focus on a single grammatical rule and count how often a child obeys it and how often he or she versus flouts it, the results are very impressive: for just about every rule that has been looked at, three-year olds obey it a majority of the time (Stromswold, 1990; Pinker, 1984, 1989; Crain, 1992; Marcus, et al., 1992). As we have seen, children rarely scramble word orders and, by the age of three, come to supply most inflections and function words in sentences that require them. Though our ears perk up when we hear errors like mens, wents, Can you broke those?, What he can ride in?, That's a furniture, Button me the rest, and Going to see kitten, the errors occur in anywhere from 0.1% to 8% of the opportunities for making them; more than 90% of the time, the child is on target. The next chapter follows one of those errors in detail. Children do not seem to favor any particular kind of language (indeed, it would be puzzling how any kind of language could survive if children did not easily learn it!). They swiftly acquire free word order, SOV and VSO orders, rich systems of case and agreement, strings of agglutinated suffixes, ergative case marking, and whatever else their language throws at them, with no lag relative to their English-speaking counterparts. Even grammatical gender, which many adults learning a second language find mystifying, presents no problem: children acquiring language like French, German, and Hebrew acquire gender marking quickly, make few errors, and never use the association with maleness and femaleness as a false criterion (Levy, 1983). It is safe to say that except for constructions that are rare, predominantly used in written language, or mentally taxing even to an adult (like The horse that the elephant tickled kissed the pig), all parts of all languages are acquired before the child turns four (Slobin, 1985/1992). 4 Explaining Language Acquisition How do we explain children's course of language acquisition -- most importantly, their inevitable and early mastery? Several kinds of mechanisms are at work. As we saw in section (), the brain changes after birth, and these maturational changes may govern the onset, rate, and adult decline of language acquisition capacity. General changes in the child's information processing abilities (attention, memory, short-term buffers for acoustic input and articulatory output) could leave their mark as well. In the next chapter, I show how a memory retrieval limitation -- children are less reliable at recalling that broke is the past tense of break -- can account for a conspicuous and universal error pattern, overregularizations like breaked (see also Marcus, et al., 1992). Many other small effects have been documented where changes in information processing abilities affect language development. For example, children selectively pick up information at the ends of words (Slobin, 1973), and at the beginnings and ends of sentences (Newport, et al, 1977), presumably because these are the parts of strings that are best retained in short term memory. Similarly, the progressively widening bottleneck for early word combinations presumably reflects a general increase in motor planning capacity. Conceptual development (see Chapter X), too, might affect language development: if a child has not yet mastered a difficult semantic distinction, such as the complex temporal relations involved in John will have gone, he or she may be unable to master the syntax of the construction dedicated to expressing it.

The complexity of a grammatical form has a demonstrable role in development: simpler rules and forms appear in speech before more complex ones, all other things being equal. For example, the plural marker s in English (e.g. cats), which requires knowing only whether the number of referents is singular or plural, is used consistently before the present tense marker -s (he walks), which requires knowing whether the subject is singular or plural and whether it is a first, second, or third person and whether the event is in the present tense (Brown, 1973). Similarly, complex forms are sometimes first used in simpler approximations. Russian contains one case marker for masculine nominative (i.e., a suffix on a masculine noun indicating that it is the subject of the sentence), one for feminine nominative, one for masculine accusative (used to indicate that a noun is a direct object), and one for feminine accusative. Children often use each marker with the correct case, never using a nominative marker for accusative nouns or viceversa, but don't properly use the masculine and feminine variants with masculine and feminine nouns (Slobin, 1985). But these global trends do not explain the main event: how children succeed. Language acquisition is so complex that one needs a precise framework for understanding what it involves -- indeed, what learning in general involves. 4.1 Learnability Theory What is language acquisition, in principle? A branch of theoretical computer science called Learnability Theory attempts to answer this question (Gold, 1967; Osherson, Stob, & Weinstein, 1985; Pinker, 1979). Learnability theory has defined learning as a scenario involving four parts (the theory embraces all forms of learning, but I will use language as the example): 1. A class of languages. One of them is the "target" language, to be - attained by the learner, but the learner does not, of course, know - which it is. In the case of children, the class of languages would - consist of the existing and possible human languages; the target - language is the one spoken in their community. 2. An environment. This is the information in the world that the learner has to go on in trying to acquire the language. In the case of children, it might include the sentences parents utter, the context in which they utter them, feedback to the child (verbal or nonverbal) in response to the child's own speech, and so on. Parental utterances can be a random sample of the language, or they might have some special properties: they might be ordered in certain ways, sentences might be repeated or only uttered once, and so on. 3. A learning strategy. The learner, using information in the environment, tries out "hypotheses" about the target language. The learning strategy is the algorithm that creates the hypotheses and determines whether they are consistent with the input information from the environment. For children, it is the "grammar-forming" mechanism in their brains; their "language acquisition device." 4. A success criterion. If we want to say that "learning" occurs, presumably it is because the learners' hypotheses are not random, - but that by some time the hypotheses are related in some systematic - way to the target language. Learners may arrive at a hypothesis - identical to the target language after some fixed period of time; - they may arrive at an approximation to it; they may waiver among a - set of hypotheses one of which is correct. Theorems in learnability theory show how assumptions about any of the three components imposes logical constraints on the fourth. It is not hard to show why learning a language, on logical grounds alone, is so hard. Like all "induction problems" (uncertain generalizations from instances), there are an infinite number of hypotheses consistent with any finite sample of environmental information. Learnability theory shows which induction problems are solvable and which are not.

A key factor is the role of negative evidence, or information about which strings of words are not sentences in the language to be acquired. Human children might get such information by being corrected every time they speak ungrammatically. If they aren't -- and as we shall see, they probably aren't -- the acquisition problem is all the harder. Consider Figure 1, where languages are depicted as circles corresponding to sets of word strings, and all the logical possibilities for how the child's language could differ from the adult language are depicted. There are four possibilities. (a) The child's hypothesis language (H) is disjoint from the language to be acquired (the "target language," T). That would correspond to the state of child learning English who cannot say a single well-formed English sentence. For example, the child might be able only to say things like we breaked it, and we goed, never we broke it or we went. (b) The child's hypothesis and the target language intersect. Here the child would be able to utter some English sentences, like he went. However, he or she also uses strings of words that are not English, such as we breaked it; and some sentences of English, such as we broke it, would still be outside their abilities. (c) The child's hypothesis language is a subset of the target language. That would mean that the child would have mastered some of English, but not all of it, but that everything the child had mastered would be part of English. The child might not be able to say we broke it, but he or she would be able to say some grammatical sentences, such as we went; no errors such as she breaked it or we goed would occur. The final logical possibility is (d), where The child's hypothesis language is a superset of the target language. That would occur, for example, if the child could say we broke it, we went, we breaked it and we goed. In cases (a-c), the child can realize that the hypothesis is incorrect by hearing sentences from parental "positive evidence," (indicated by the "+" symbol) that are in the target language but not the hypothesized one: sentences such as we broke it. This is impossible in case (d); negative evidence (such as corrections of the child's ungrammatical sentences by his or her parents) would be needed. In other words, without negative evidence, if a child guesses too large a language, the world can never tell him he's wrong. This has several consequences. For one thing, the most general learning algorithm one might conceive of -- one that is capable of hypothesizing any grammar, or any computer program capable of generating a language -- is in trouble. Without negative evidence (and even in many cases with it), there is no generalpurpose, all-powerful learning machine; a machine must in some sense "know" something about the constraints in the domain in which it is learning. More concretely, if children don't receive negative evidence (see Section ) we have a lot of explaining to do, because overly large hypotheses are very easy for the child to make. For example, children actually do go through stages in which they use two or more past tense forms for a given verb, such as broke and breaked -- this case is discussed in detail in my other chapter in this volume. They derive transitive verbs from intransitives too freely: where an adult might say both The ice melted and I melted the ice, children also can say The girl giggled and Don't giggle me! (Bowerman, 1982b; Pinker, 1989). In each case they are in situation (d) in Figure 1, and unless their parents slip them some signal in every case that lets them know they are not speaking properly, it is puzzling that they eventually stop. That is, we would need to explain how they grow into adults who are more restrictive in their speech -- or another way of putting is that it's puzzling that the English language doesn't allow don't giggle me and she eated given that children are tempted to grow up talking that way. If the world isn't telling children to stop, something in their brains is, and we have to find out who or what is causing the change. Let's now examine language acquisition in the human species by breaking it down into the four elements that give a precise definition to learning: the target of learning, the input, the degree of success, and the learning strategy. 5 What is Learned

To understand how X is learned, you first have to understand what X is. Linguistic theory is thus an essential part of the study of language acquisition (see the Chapter by Lasnik). Linguistic research tries do three things. First, it must characterize the facts of English, and all the other languages whose acquisition we are interested in explaining. Second, since children are not predisposed to learn English or any other language, linguistics has to examine the structure of other languages. In particular, linguists characterize which aspects of grammar are universal, prevalent, rare, and nonexistent across languages. Contrary to early suspicions, languages do not vary arbitrarily and without limit; there is by now a large catalogue of language universals, properties shared exactly, or in a small number of variations, by all languages (see Comrie, 1981; Greenberg, 1978; Shopen, 1985). This obviously bears on what children's language acquisition mechanisms find easy or hard to learn. And one must go beyond a mere list of universals. Many universal properties of language are not specific to language but are simply reflections of universals of human experience. All languages have words for "water" and "foot" because all people need to refer to water and feet; no language has a word a million syllables long because no person would have time to say it. But others might be specific to the innate design of language itself. For example, if a language has both derivational suffixes (which create new words from old ones, like -ism) and inflectional suffixes (which modify a word to fit its role in the sentence, like plural -s), then the derivational suffixes are always closer to the word stem than the inflectional ones. For example, in English one can say Darwinisms (derivational -ism closer to the stem than inflectional -s) but not Darwinsism. It is hard to think of a reason how this law would fit in to any universal law of thought or memory: why would the concept of two ideologies based on one Darwin should be thinkable, but the concept of one ideology based on two Darwins (say, Charles and Erasmus) not be thinkable (unless one reasons in a circle and declares that the mind must find -ism to be more cognitively basic than the plural, because that's the order we see in language). Universals like this, that are specifically linguistic, should be captured in a theory of Universal Grammar (UG) (Chomsky, 1965, 1981, 1991). UG specifies the allowable mental representations and operations that all languages are confined to use. The theory of universal grammar is closely tied to the theory of the mental mechanisms children use in acquiring language; their hypotheses about language must be couched in structures sanctioned by UG. To see how linguistic research can't be ignored in understanding language acquisition, consider the sentences below. In each of the examples, a learner who heard the (a) and (b) sentences could quite sensibly extract a general rule that, when applied to the (c) sentence, yield version (d). Yet the result is an odd sentence that no one would say: 1. (a) John saw Mary with her best friend's husband. (b) Who did John see Mary with? (c) John saw Mary and her best friend's husband. (d) *Who did John see Mary and? 2. (a) Irv drove the car into the garage. (b) Irv drove the car. (c) Irv put the car into the garage. (d) *Irv put the car. 3. (a) I expect the fur to fly. (b) I expect the fur will fly.

(c) The fur is expected to fly. (d) *The fur is expected will fly. 4. (a) The baby seems to be asleep. (b) The baby seems asleep. (c) The baby seems to be sleeping. (d) *The baby seems sleeping. 5. (a) John liked the pictures of Bill that Mary took. (b) John liked Mary's pictures of Bill. (c) John liked the pictures of himself that Mary took. (d) *John liked Mary's pictures of himself. The solution to the problem must be that children's learning mechanisms ultimately don't allow them to make what would otherwise be a tempting generalization. For example, in (1), constraints that prevent extraction of a single phrase out of a coordinate structure (phrases joined by a word like and or or) would block would what otherwise be a natural generalization from other examples of extraction, such as 1(a-b). The other examples presents other puzzles that the theory of universal grammar, as part of a theory of language acquisition, must solve. It is because of the subtlety of these examples, and the abstractness of the principles of universal grammar that must be posited to explain them, that Chomsky has claimed that the overall structure of language must be innate, based on his paper-and-pencil examination of the facts of language alone. 6 Input To understand how children learn language, we have to know what aspects of language (from their parents or peers) they have access to. 6.1 Positive Evidence Children clearly need some kind of linguistic input to acquire a language. There have been occasional cases in history where abandoned children have somehow survived in forests, such as Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron (subject of a film by Francois Truffaut). Occasionally other modern children have grown up wild because depraved parents have raised them silently in dark rooms and attics; the chapter by Newport and Gleitman discuss some of those cases. The outcome is always the same: the children, when found, are mute. Whatever innate grammatical abilities there are, they are too schematic to generate concrete speech, words, and grammatical constructions on their own. Children do not, however, need to hear a full-fledged language; as long as they are in a community with other children, and have some source for individual words, they will invent one on their own, often in a single generation. Children who grew up in plantations and slave colonies were often exposed to a crude pidgin that served as the lingua franca in these Babels of laborers. But they grew up to speak genuinely new languages, expressive "creoles" with their own complex grammars (Bickerton, 1984; see also the Chapter by Newport and Gleitman). The sign languages of the deaf arose in similar ways. Indeed, they arise spontaneously and quickly wherever there is a community of deaf children (Senghas, 1994; Kegl, 1994).

Children most definitely do need to hear an existing language to learn that language, of course. Children with Japanese genes do not find Japanese any easier than English, or vice-versa; they learn whichever language they are exposed to. The term "positive evidence" refers to the information available to the child about which strings of words are grammatical sentences of the target language. By "grammatical," incidentally, linguists and psycholinguists mean only those sentences that sound natural in colloquial speech, not necessarily those that would be deemed "proper English" in formal written prose. Thus split infinitives, dangling participles, slang, and so on, are "grammatical" in this sense (and indeed, are as logical, systematic, expressive, and precise as "correct" written English, often more so; see Pinker, 1994a). Similarly, elliptical utterances, such as when the question Where are you going? is answered with To the store), count as grammatical. Ellipsis is not just random snipping from sentences, but is governed by rules that are part of the grammar of one's language or dialect. For example, the grammar of casual British English allows you to answer the question Will he go? by saying He might do, whereas the grammar of American English doesn't allow it. Given this scientific definition of "grammatical," do we find that parents' speech counts as "positive evidence"? That is, when a parent uses a sentence, can the child assume that it is part of the language to be learned, or do parents use so many ungrammatical sentences random fragments, slips of the tongue, hesitations, and false starts that the child would have to take much of it with a grain of salt? Fortunately for the child, the vast majority of the speech they hear during the language-learning years is fluent, complete, and grammatically well-formed: 99.93%, according to one estimate (Newport, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 1977). Indeed, this is true of conversation among adults in general (Labov, 1969). Thus language acquisition is ordinarily driven by a grammatical sample of the target language. Note that his is true even for forms of English that people unthinkingly call "ungrammatical," "fractured," or "bad English," such as rural American English (e.g., them books; he don't; we ain't; they drug him away) and urban black English (e.g., She walking; He be working; see the Chapter by Labov). These are not corrupted versions of standard English; to a linguist they look just like different dialects, as rule-governed as the southern-England dialect of English that, for historical reasons, became the standard several centuries ago. Scientifically speaking, the grammar of working-class speech -- indeed, every human language system that has been studied -- is intricately complex, though different languages are complex in different ways. 6.2 Negative Evidence Negative evidence refers to information about which strings of words are not grammatical sentences in the language, such as corrections or other forms of feedback from a parent that tell the child that one of his or her utterances is ungrammatical. As mentioned in Section ), it's very important for us to know whether children get and need negative, because in the absence of negative evidence, any child who hypothesizes a rule that generates a superset of the language will have no way of knowing that he or she is wrong Gold, 1967; Pinker, 1979, 1989). If children don't get, or don't use, negative evidence, they must have some mechanism that either avoids generating too large a language the child would be conservative - or that can recover from such overgeneration. Roger Brown and Camille Hanlon (1970) attempted to test B. F. Skinner's behaviorist claim that language learning depends on parents' reinforcement of children's grammatical behaviors. Using transcripts of naturalistic parent-child dialogue, they divided children's sentences into ones that were grammatically well-formed and ones that contained grammatical errors. They then divided adults' responses to those sentences into ones that expressed some kind of approval (e.g., "yes, that's good") and those that expressed some kind of disapproval. They looked for a correlation, but failed to find one: parents did not

differentially express approval or disapproval to their children contingent on whether the child's prior utterance was well-formed or not (approval depends, instead, on whether the child's utterance was true). Brown and Hanlon also looked at children's well-formed and badly-formed questions, and whether parents seemed to answer them appropriately, as if they understood them, or with non sequiturs. They found parents do not understand their children's well-formed questions better than their badly-formed ones. Other studies (e.g. Hirsh-Pasek, Treiman, and Schneiderman, 1984; Demetras, Post, and Snow, 1986; Penner, 1987; Bohannon & Stanowicz, 1988) have replicated that result, but with a twist. Some have found small statistical contingencies between the grammaticality of some children's sentence and the kind of follow-up given by their parents; for example, whether the parent repeats the sentence verbatim, asks a follow-up question, or changes the topic. But Marcus (1993) has found that these patterns fall far short of negative evidence (reliable information about the grammatical status of any word string). Different parents react in opposite ways to their children's ungrammatical sentences, and many forms of ungrammaticality are not reacted to at all -- leaving a given child unable to know what to make of any parental reaction. Even when a parent does react differentially, a child would have to repeat a particular error, verbatim, hundreds of times to eliminate the error, because the parent's reaction is only statistical: the feedback signals given to ungrammatical signals are also given nearly as often to grammatical sentences. Stromswold (1994) has an even more dramatic demonstration that parental feedback cannot be crucial. She studied a child who, for unknown neurological reasons, was congenitally unable to talk. He was a good listener, though, and when tested he was able to understand complicated sentences perfectly, and to judge accurately whether a sentence was grammatical or ungrammatical. The boy's abilities show that children certainly do not need negative evidence to learn grammatical rules properly, even in the unlikely event that their parents provided it. These results, though of profound importance, should not be too surprising. Every speaker of English judges sentences such as I dribbled the floor with paint and Ten pounds was weighed by the boy and Who do you believe the claim that John saw? and John asked Mary to look at himself to be ungrammatical. But it is unlikely that every such speaker has at some point uttered these sentences and benefited from negative feedback. The child must have some mental mechanisms that rule out vast numbers of "reasonable" strings of words without any outside intervention. 6.3 Motherese Parents and caretakers in most parts of the world modify their speech when talking to young children, one example of how people in general use several "registers" in different social settings. Speech to children is slower, shorter, in some ways (but not all) simpler, higher-pitched, more exaggerated in intonation, more fluent and grammatically well-formed, and more directed in content to the present situation, compared to speech among adults (Snow & Ferguson, 1977). Many parents also expand their children's utterances into full sentences, or offer sequences of paraphrases of a given sentence. One should not, though, consider this speech register, sometimes called "Motherese," to be a set of "language lessons." Though mother's speech may seem simple at first glance, in many ways it is not. For example, speech to children is full of questions -- sometimes a majority of the sentences. If you think questions are simple, just try to write a set of rules that accounts for the following sentences and nonsentences:

1. He can go somewhere. Where can he go? *Where can he go somewhere? *Where he can go? *Where did he can go? 2. He went somewhere. Where did he go? He went WHERE? *Where went he? *Where did he went? *Where he went? *He did go WHERE? 3. He went home. Why did he go home? How come he went home? *Why he went home? *How come did he go home? Linguists struggle over these facts (see the Chapters by Lasnik and Larson), some of the most puzzling in the English language. But these are the constructions that infants are bombarded with and that they master in their preschool years. The chapter by Newport and Gleitman gives another reason for doubting that Motherese is a set of language lessons. Children whose mothers use Motherese more consistently don't pass through the milestones of language development any faster (Newport, et al, 1977). Furthermore, there are some communities with radically different ideas about children's proper place in society. In some societies, for example, people tacitly assume that that children aren't worth speaking to, and don't have anything to say that is worth listening to. Such children learn to speak by overhearing streams of adult-to-adult speech (Heath, 1983). In some communities in New Guinea, mothers consciously try to teach their children language, but not in the style familiar to us, of talking to them indulgently. Rather, they wait until a third party is present, and coach the child as to the proper, adultlike sentences they should use (see Schieffelin & Eisenberg, 1981). Nonetheless, those children, like all children, grow up to be fluent language speakers. It surely must help children when their parents speak slowly, clearly, and succinctly to them, but their success at learning can't be explained by any special grammar-unveiling properties of parental babytalk. 6.4 Prosody Parental speech is not a string of printed words on a ticker-tape, nor is it in a monotone like sciencefiction robots. Normal human speech has a pattern of melody, timing, and stress called prosody. And motherese directed to young infants has a characteristic, exaggerated prosody of its own: a rise and fall contour for approving, a set of sharp staccato bursts for prohibiting, a rise pattern for directing attention, and smooth, low legato murmurs for comforting. Fernald (1992) has shown that these patterns are very widespread across language communities, and may be universal. The melodies seem to attract the child's attention, mark the sounds as speech as opposed to stomach growlings or other noises, and might distinguish statements, questions, and imperatives, delineate major sentence boundaries, and highlight new words. When given a choice, babies prefer to listen to speech with these properties than to speech intended for adults (Fernald, 1984, 1992; Hirsh-Pasek, Nelson, Jusczyk, Cassidy, Druss, & Kennedy, 1987).

In all speech, a number of prosodic properties of the speech wave, such as lengthening, intonation, and pausing, are influenced by the syntactic structure of the sentence (Cooper & Paccia-Cooper, 1980). Just listen to how you would say the word like in the sentence The boy I like slept compared to The boy I saw likes sleds. In the first sentence, the word like is at the boundary of a relative clause and is drawn out, exaggerated in intonation, and followed by a pause; in the second, it is in the middle of a verb phrase and is pronounced more quickly, uniformly in intonation, and is run together with the following word. Some psychologists (e.g., Gleitman & Wanner, 1984; Gleitman, 1990) have suggested that children use this information in the reverse direction, and read the syntactic structure of a sentence directly off its melody and timing. We will examine the hypothesis in Section . 6.5 Context Children do not hear sentences in isolation, but in a context. No child has learned language from the radio; indeed, children rarely if ever learn language from television. Ervin-Tripp (1973) studied hearing children of deaf parents whose only access to English was from radio or television broadcasts. The children did not learn any speech from that input. One reason is that without already knowing the language, it would be difficult for a child to figure out what the characters in the unresponsive televised worlds are talking about. In interacting with live human speakers, who tend to talk about the here and now in the presence of children, the child can be more of a mind-reader, guessing what the speaker might have meant (Macnamara, 1972, 1982; Schlesinger, 1971). That is, before children have learned syntax, they know the meaning of many words, and they might be able to make good guesses as to what their parents are saying based on their knowledge of how the referents of these words typically act (for example, people tend to eat apples, but not vice-versa). In fact, parental speech to young children is so redundant with its context that a person with no knowledge of the order in which parents' words are spoken, only the words themselves, can infer from transcripts, with high accuracy, what was being said (Slobin, 1977). Many models of language acquisition assume that the input to the child consists of a sentence and a representation of the meaning of that sentence, inferred from context and from the child's knowledge of the meanings of the words (e.g. Anderson, 1977; Berwick, 1986; Pinker, 1982, 1984; Wexler & Culicover, 1980). Of course, this can't literally be true -- children don't hear every word of every sentence, and surely don't, to begin with, perceive the entire meaning of a sentence from context. Blind children, whose access to the nonlinguistic world is obviously severely limited, learn language without many problems (Landau & Gleitman, 1985). And when children do succeed in guessing a parent's meaning, it can't be by simple temporal contiguity. For example, Gleitman (1990) points out that when a mother arriving home from work opens the door, she is likely to say, "What did you do today?," not I'm opening the door. Similarly, she is likely to say "Eat your peas" when her child is, say, looking at the dog, and certainly not when the child is already eating peas. Still, the assumption of context-derived semantic input is a reasonable idealization, if one considers the abilities of the whole child. The child must keep an updated mental model of the current situation, created by mental faculties for perceiving objects and events and the states of mind and communicative intentions of other humans. The child can use this knowledge, plus the meanings of any familiar words in the sentence, to infer what the parent probably meant. In Section we will discuss how children might fill the important gaps in what they can infer from context. 7 What and When Children Learn People do not reproduce their parents' language exactly. If they did, we would all still be speaking like Chaucer. But in any generation, in most times, the differences between parents' language and the one their children ultimately acquire is small. And remember that, judging by their spontaneous speech, we can

conclude that most children have mastered their mother tongue (allowing for performance errors due to complexity or rarity of a construction) some time in their threes. It seems that the success criterion for human language is something close to full mastery, and in a short period of time. To show that young children really have grasped the design plan of language, rather than merely approximating it with outwardly-convincing routines or rules of thumb which would have to be supplanted later in life, we can't just rely on what they say; we need to use clever experimental techniques. Let's look at two examples that illustrate how even very young children seem to obey the innate complex design of Universal Grammar. Earlier I mentioned that in all languages, if there are derivational affixes that build new words out of old ones, like -ism, -er, and -able, and inflectional affixes that modify a word according to its role in the sentence, like -s, -ed, and -ing, then the derivational affix appears inside the inflectional one: Darwinisms is possible, Darwinsism is not. This and many other grammatical quirks were nicely explained in a theory of word structure proposed by Paul Kiparsky (1982). Kiparsky showed that words are built in layers or "levels." To build a word, you can start with a root (like Darwin). Then you can rules of a certain kind to it, called "Level 1 Rules," to yield a more complex word. For example, there is a rule adding the suffix -ian, turning the word into Darwinian. Level 1 Rules, according to the theory, can affect the sound of the stem; in this case, the syllable carrying the stress shifts from Dar to win. Level 2 rules apply to a word after any Level 1 rules have been applied. An example of a Level 2 rule is the one that adds the suffix -ism, yielding, for example, Darwinism. Level 2 rules generally do not affect the pronunciation of the words they apply to; they just add material onto the word, leaving the pronunciation intact. (The stress in Darwinism is the same as it was in Darwin.) Finally, Level 3 rules apply to a word after any Level 2 rules have been applied. The regular rules of inflectional morphology are examples of Level 3 rules. An example is the rule that adds an -s to the end of a noun to form its plural -- for example, Darwinians or Darwinisms. Crucially, the rules cannot apply out of order. The input to a Level 1 rules must be a word root. The input to a level 2 rule must be either a root or the output of Level 1 rules. The input to a Level 3 rule must be a root, the output of Level 1 rules, or the output of Level 2 rules. That constraint yields predictions about what kinds of words are possible and which are impossible. For example, the ordering makes it impossible to derive Darwinianism and Darwinianisms, but not Darwinsian, Darwinsism, and Darwinismian. Now, irregular inflection, such as the pairing of mouse with mice, belongs to Level 1, whereas regular inflectional rules, such as the one that relates rat to rats, belongs to Level 3. Compounding, the rule that would produce Darwin-lover and mousetrap, is a Level 2 rule, in between. This correctly predicts that an irregular plural can easily appear inside a compound, but a regular plural cannot. Compare the following: ice-infested (OK); rats-infested (bad) men-bashing (OK); guys-bashing (bad) teethmarks (OK); clawsmarks (bad) feet-warmer (OK); hand-warmer (bad) purple people-eater (OK); purple babies-eater (bad) Mice-infested is a possible word, because the process connecting mouse with mice comes before the rule combining the noun with infested. However, rats-infested, even though it is cognitively quite similar to mice-infested, sounds strange; we can say only rat-infested (even though by definition one rat does not make an infestation).

Peter Gordon (1986) had children between the ages of 3 and 5 participate in an elicited-production experiment in which he would say, "Here is a puppet who likes to eat _____. What would you call him?" He provided a response for several singular mass nouns, like mud, beforehand, so that the children were aware of the existence of the "x-eater" compound form. Children behaved just like adults: a puppet who likes to eat a mouse was called a mouse-eater, a puppet who likes to eat a rat was called a rat-eater, a puppet who likes to eat mice was called either a mouse-eater or a mice-eater -- but -- a puppet who likes to eat rats was called a rat-eater, never a rats-eater. Interestingly, children treated their own overregularizations, such as mouses, exactly as they treated legitimate regular plurals: they would never call the puppet a mouses-eater, even if they used mouses in their own speech. Even more interestingly, Gordon examined how children could have acquired the constraint. Perhaps, he reasoned, they had learned the fact that compounds can contain either singulars or irregular plurals, never regular plurals, by paying keeping track of all the kinds of compounds that do and don't occur in their parents' speech. It turns out that they would have no way of learning that fact. Although there is no grammatical reason why compounds would not contain irregular plurals, the speech that most children hear does not contain any. Compounds like toothbrush abound; compounds containing irregular plurals like teethmarks, people-eater, and men-bashing, though grammatically possible, are statistically rare, according to the standardized frequency data that Gordon examined, and he found none that was likely to appear in the speech children hear. Therefore children were willing to say mice-eater and unwilling to say rats-eater with no good evidence from the input that that is the pattern required in English. Gordon suggests that this shows that the constraints on level-ordering may be innate. Let's now go from words to sentences. Sentence are ordered strings of words. No child could fail to notice word order in learning and understanding language. But most regularities of language govern hierarchically-organized structures -- words grouped into phrases, phrases grouped into clauses, clauses grouped into sentences (see the Chapters by Lasnik, by Larson, and by Newport & Gleitman). If the structures of linguistic theory correspond to the hypotheses that children formulate when they analyze parental speech and form rules, children should create rules defined over hierarchical structures, not simple properties of linear order such as which word comes before which other word or how close two words are in a sentence. The chapter by Gleitman and Newport discusses one nice demonstration of how adults (who are, after all, just grown-up children) respect constituent structure, not simple word order, when forming questions. Here is an example making a similar point that has been tried out with children. Languages often have embedded clauses missing a subject, such as John told Mary to leave, where the embedded "downstairs" clause to leave has no subject. The phenomenon of control governs how the missing subject is interpreted. In this sentence it is Mary who is understood as having the embedded subject's role, that is, the person doing the leaving. We say that the phrase Mary "controls" the missing subject position of the lower clause. For most verbs, there is a simple principle defining control. If the upstairs verb has no object, then the subject of the upstairs verb controls the missing subject of the downstairs verb. For example, in John tried to leave, John is interpreted as the subject of both try and leave. If the upstairs verb has a subject and an object, then it is the object that controls the missing subject of the downstairs verb, as we saw in John told Mary to leave. In 1969, Carol Chomsky published a set of classic experiments in developmental psycholinguistics. She showed that children apply this principle quite extensively, even for the handful of verbs that are exceptions to it. In act-out comprehension experiments on children between the ages of 5 and 10, she showed that even relatively old children were prone to this kind of mistake. When told "Mickey promised Donald to jump; Make him jump," the children made Donald, the object of the first verb, do the jumping, in accord with the general principle. The "right answer" in this case would have been Mickey, because

promise is an exception to the principle, calling for an unusual kind of control where the subject of the upstairs verb, not the object of the upstairs verb, should act as controller. But what, exactly, is the principle that children are over-applying? One possibility can be called the Minimal Distance Principle: the controller of the downstairs verb is the noun phrase nearest to it in the linear string of words in the sentence. If children analyze sentences in terms of linear order, this should be a natural generalization. However, it isn't right for the adult language. Consider the passive sentence Mary was told by John to leave. The phrase John is closest to the subject position for leave, but adult English speakers understand the sentence as meaning that Mary is the one leaving. The Minimal Distance Principle gives the wrong answer here. Instead, for the adult language, we need a principle sensitive to grammatical structure, such as the "c-control" structural relation discussed in the Chapter by Lasnik [?]. Let's consider a simplified version, which we can call the Structural Principle. It might say that the controller of a missing subject is the grammatical object of the upstairs verb if it has one; otherwise it is the grammatical subject of the upstairs verb (both of them c-command the missing subject). The object of a preposition in the higher clause, however, is never allowed to be a controller, basically because it is embedded "too deeply" in the sentence's tree structure to c-command the missing subject. That's why Mary was told by John to leave has Mary as the controller. (It is also why, incidentally, the sentence Mary was promised by John to leave is unintelligible -- it would require a prepositional phrase to be the controller, which is ruled out by the Structural Principle.) It would certainly be understandable if children were to follow the Minimal Distance Principle. Not only is it easily stated in terms of surface properties that children can easily perceive, but sentences that would disconfirm it like Mary was told by John to leave are extremely rare in parents' speech. Michael Maratsos (1974) did the crucial experiment. He gave children such sentences and asked them who was leaving. Of course, on either account children would have to be able to understand the passive construction to interpret these sentences, and Maratsos gave them a separate test of comprehension of simple passive sentences to select out only those children who could do so. And indeed, he found that those children interpreted passive sentences with missing embedded subjects just as adults would. That is, in accord with the Structural Principle and in violation of the Minimal Distance Principle, they interpreted Mary was told by John to leave as having the subject, Mary, do the leaving; that is, as the controller. The experiment shows how young children have grasped the abstract structural relations in sentences, and have acquired a grammar of the same design as that spoken by their parents. 8 The Child's Language-Learning Algorithm Here is the most basic problem in understanding how children learn a language: The input to language acquisition consists of sounds and situations; the output is a grammar specifying, for that language, the order and arrangement of abstract entities like nouns, verbs, subjects, phrase structures, control, and ccommand (see the Chapters by Lasnik and Larson, and the demonstrations in this chapter and the one by Gleitman and Newport). Somehow the child must discover these entities to learn the language. We know that even preschool children have an extensive unconscious grasp of grammatical structure, to the experiments on discussed in the previous section, but how has the child managed to go from sounds and situations to syntactic structure? Innate knowledge of grammar itself is not sufficient. It does no good for the child to have written down in his brain "There exist nouns"; children need some way of finding them in parents' speech, so that they can determine, among other things, whether the nouns come before the verb, as in English, or after, as in Irish. Once the child finds nouns and verbs, any innate knowledge would immediately be helpful, because the child could then deduce all kinds of implications about how they can be used. But finding them is the crucial first step, and it is not an easy one.

In English, nouns can be identified as those things that come after articles, get suffixed with -s in the plural, and so on. But the infant obviously doesn't know that yet. Nouns don't occur in any constant position in a sentence across the languages of the world, and they aren't said with any particular tone of voice. Nor do nouns have a constant meaning -- they often refer to physical things, like dogs, but don't have to, as in The days of our lives and The warmth of the sun. The same is true for other linguistic entities, such as verbs, subjects, objects, auxiliaries, and tense. Since the child must somehow "lift himself up by his bootstraps" to get started in formulating a grammar for the language, this is called the "bootstrapping problem" (see Pinker, 1982, 1984, 1987b, 1989, 1994; Morgan, 1986; Gleitman, 1990; and the contributors to Morgan and Demuth, 1995). Several solutions can be envisioned. 8.1 Extracting Simple Correlations One possibility is that the child sets up a massive correlation matrix, and tallies which words appear in which positions, which words appear next to which other words, which words get which prefixes and suffixes in which circumstances, and so on. Syntactic categories would arise implicitly as the child discovered that certain sets of properties are mutually intercorrelated in large sets of words. For example, many words tend to occur between a subject and an object, are inflected with -s when the subject is singular and in the third person and the tense is present, and often appear after the word to. This set of words would be grouped together as the equivalent of the "verb" category (Maratsos & Chalkley, 1981). There are two problems with this proposal. The main one is that the features that the prelinguistic child is supposed to be cross-referencing are not audibly marked in parental speech. Rather, they are perceptible only to child who has already analyzed the grammar of the language -- just what the proposal is trying to explain in the first place! How is a prelinguistic child supposed to find the "subject" of the sentence in order to correlate it with the ending on the words he or she is focusing on? A subject is not the same thing as the first word or two of the sentence (e.g., The big bad wolf huffed and puffed) or even the first phrase (e.g., What did the big bad wolf do?). We have a dilemma. If the features defining the rows and columns of the correlation matrix are things that are perceptible to the child, like "first word in a sentence," then grammatical categories will never emerge, because they have no consistent correlation with these features. But if the features are the things that do define grammatical categories, like agreement and phrase structure position, the proposal assumes just what it sets out to explain, namely that the child has analyzed the input into its correct grammatical structures. Somehow, the child must break into this circle. It is a general danger that pops up in cognitive psychology whenever anyone proposes a model that depends on correlations among features: there is always a temptation to glibly endow the features with the complex, abstract representations whose acquisition one is trying to explain. The second problem is that, without prior constraints on the design of the feature-correlator, there are an astronomical number of possible intercorrelations among linguistic properties for the child to test. To take just two, the child would have to determine whether a sentence containing the word cat in third position must have a plural word at the end, and whether sentences ending in words ending in d are invariably preceded by words referring to plural entities. Most of these correlations never occur in any natural language. It would be mystery, then, why children are built with complex machinery designed to test for them -- though another way of putting it is that it would be a mystery why there are no languages exhibiting certain kinds of correlations given that children are capable of finding them. 8.2 Using Prosody A second way in which the child could begin syntax learning would be to attend to the prosody of sentences, and to posit phrase boundaries at points in the acoustic stream marked by lengthening, pausing, and drops in fundamental frequency. The proposal seems attractive, because prosodic properties are

perceptible in advance of knowing any syntax, so at first glance prosody seems like a straightforward way for a child to break into the language system. But on closer examination, the proposal does not seem to work (Pinker, 1987, 1994b; Fernald and McRoberts, in press; Steedman, in press). Just as gold glitters, but all that glitters is not gold, syntactic structure affects aspects of prosody, but aspects of prosody are affected by many things besides syntax. The effects of emotional state of the speaker, intent of the speaker, word frequency, contrastive stress, and syllabic structure of individual words, are all mixed together, and there is no way for a child to disentangle them from the sound wave alone. For example, in the sentence The baby ate the slug, the main pause coincides with the major syntactic boundary between the subject and the predicate. But a child cannot work backwards and assume that the main pause in an input sentence marks the boundary between the subject and the predicate. In the similar sentence He ate the slug, the main pause is at the more embedded boundary between the verb and its object. Worse, the mapping between syntax and prosody, even when it is consistent, is consistent in different ways in different languages. So a young child cannot use any such consistency, at least not at the very beginning of language acquisition, to decipher the syntax of the sentence, because it itself is one of the things that has to be learned. 8.3 Using Context and Semantics A third possibility (see Pinker, 1982, 1984, 1989; Macnamara, 1982; Grimshaw 1981; Wexler & Culicover, 1980; Bloom, in press) exploits the fact that there is a one-way contingency between syntax and semantics in the basic sentences of most of the world's languages. Though not all nouns are physical objects, all physical objects are named by nouns. Similarly, if a verb has an argument playing the semantic role of 'agent', then that argument will be expressed as the subject of basic sentences in language after language. (Again, this does not work in reverse: the subject is not necessarily an agent. In John liked Mary the subject is an "experiencer"; in John pleased Mary it is an object of experience; in John received a package it is a goal or recipient; in John underwent an operation it is a patient.) Similarly, entities directly affected by an action are expressed as objects (but not all objects are entities affected by an action); actions themselves are expressed as verbs (though not all verbs express actions). Even phrase structure configurations have semantic correlates: arguments of verbs reliably appear as "sisters" to them inside the verb phrase in phrase structure trees (see the chapter by Lasnik). If children assume that semantic and syntactic categories are related in restricted ways in the early input, they could use semantic properties of words and phrases (inferred from context; see Section ) as evidence that they belong to certain syntactic categories. For example, a child can infer that a word that designated a person, place or thing is a noun, that a word designating an action is a verb, that a word expressing the agent argument of an action predicate is the subject of its sentence, and so on. For example, upon hearing the sentence The cat chased the rat, the child can deduce that in English the subject comes before the verb, that the object comes after the verb, and so on. This would give the child the basis for creating the phrase structure trees that allow him or her to analyze the rules of the language. Of course, a child cannot literally create a grammar that contains rules like "Agent words come before action words." This would leave the child no way of knowing how to order the words in sentences such as Apples appeal to Mary or John received a package. But once an initial set of rules is learned, items that are more abstract or that don't follow the usual patterns relating syntax and semantic could be learned through their distribution in already-learned structures. That is, the child could now infer that Apples is the subject of appeal, and that John is the subject of receive, because they are in subject position, a fact

the child now knows thanks to the earlier cat-chased-rat sentences. Similarly, the child could infer that appeal is a verb to begin with because it is in the "verb" position. 9 Acquisition in Action What do all these arguments mean for what goes on in a child's mind moment by moment as he or she is acquiring rules from parental speech? Let's look at the process as concretely as possible. 9.1 Bootstrapping the First Rules First imagine a hypothetical child trying to extract patterns from the following sentences, without any innate guidance as to how human grammar works. Myron eats lamb. Myron eats fish. Myron likes fish. At first glance, one might think that the child could analyze the input as follows. Sentences consist of three words: the first must be Myron, the second either eats or likes, the third lamb or fish. With these micro-rules, the child can already generalize beyond the input, to the brand new sentence Myron likes chicken. But let's say the next two sentences are Myron eats loudly. Myron might fish. The word might gets added to the list of words that can appear in second position, and the word loudly is added to the list that can appear in third position. But look at the generalizations this would allow: Myron might loudly. Myron likes loudly. Myron might lamb. This is not working. The child must couch rules in grammatical categories like noun, verb, and auxiliary, not in actual words. That way, fish as a noun and fish as a verb can be kept separate, and the child would not adulterate the noun rule with instances of verbs and vice-versa. If children are willing to guess that words for objects are nouns, words for actions are verbs, and so on, they would have a leg up on the rulelearning problem. But words are not enough; they must be ordered. Imagine the child trying to figure out what kind of word can occur before the verb bother. It can't be done: That dog bothers me. [dog, a noun] What she wears bothers me. [wears, a verb] Music that is too loud bothers me. [loud, an adjective] Cheering too loudly bothers me. [loudly, an adverb] The guy she hangs out with bothers me. [with, a preposition] The problem is obvious. There is a certain something that must come before the verb bother, but that something is not a kind of word; it is a kind of phrase, a noun phrase. A noun phrase always contains a head noun, but that noun can be followed by many other phrases. So it is useless of try to learn a language by analyzing sentences word by word. The child must look for phrases -- and the experiments on grammatical control discussed earlier shows that they do.

What does it mean to look for phrases? A phrase is a group of words. Most of the logically possible groups of words in a sentence are useless for constructing new sentences, such as wears bothers and cheering too, but the child, unable to rely on parental feedback, has no way of knowing this. So once again, children cannot attack the language learning task like some logician free of preconceptions; they need prior constraints. We have already seen where such constraints could come. First, the child could assume that parents' speech respects the basic design of human phrase structure: phrases contain heads (e.g., a noun phrase is built around a head noun); arguments are grouped with heads in small phrases, sometimes called X-bars (see the chapter by Lasnik); X-bars are grouped with their modifiers inside large phrases (Noun Phrase, Verb Phrase, and so on); phrases can have subjects. Second, since the meanings of parents' sentences are guessable in context, the child could use the meanings to help set up the right phrase structure. Imagine that a parent says The big dog ate ice cream. If the child already knows the words big, dog, ate, and ice cream, he or she can guess their categories and grow the first branches of a tree: In turn, nouns and verbs must belong to noun phrases and verb phrases, so the child can posit one for each of these words. And if there is a big dog around, the child can guess that the and big modify dog, and connect them properly inside the noun phrase: If the child knows that the dog just ate ice cream, he or she can also guess that ice cream and dog are arguments of the verb eat. Dog is a special kind of argument, because it is the causal agent of the action and the topic of the sentence, and hence it is likely to be the subject of the sentence, and therefore attaches to the "S." A tree for the sentence has been completed: The rules and dictionary entries can be peeled off the tree: S --> NP VP NP --> (det) (A) N VP --> V NP dog: N ice cream: N ate: V; eater = subject, thing eaten = object the: det big: A This hypothetical example shows how a child, if suitably equipped, could learn three rules and five words from a single sentence in context. The use of part-of-speech categories, phrase structure, and meaning guessed from context are powerful tools that can help the child in the daunting task of learning grammar quickly and without systematic parental feedback (Pinker, 1984). In particular, there are many benefits to using a small number of categories like N and V to organize incoming speech. By calling both the subject and object phrases "NP," rather than, say Phrase#1 and Phrase#2, the child automatically can apply knowledge about nouns in subject position to nouns in object position, and vice-versa. For example, our model child can already generalize, and use dog as an object, without having heard an adult do so, and the child tacitly knows that adjectives precede nouns not just in subjects but in objects, again without direct evidence. The child knows that if more than one dog is dogs in subject position, more than one dog is dogs in object position. More generally, English allows at least eight possible phrasemates of a head noun inside a noun phrase, such as John's dog; dogs in the park; big dogs; dogs that I like, and so on. In turn, there are about eight places in a sentence where the whole noun phrase can go, such as Dog bites man; Man bites dog; A dog's life; Give the boy a dog; Talk to the dog; and so on. There are three ways to inflect a noun: dog, dogs, dog's. And a typical child by the time he or she is in high school has learned something like 20,000 different nouns (Miller, 1991; Pinker, 1994a). If children had to learn all the combinations separately, they would need to listen to about 140 million different sentences. At a rate of a sentence every ten seconds, ten hours a day, it would take over a century. But by unconsciously labeling all nouns as "N" and

all noun phrases as "NP," the child has only to hear about twenty-five different kinds of noun phrase and learn the nouns one by one, and the millions of possible combinations fall out automatically. Indeed, if children are constrained to look for only a small number of phrase types, they automatically gain the ability to produce an infinite number of sentences, one of the hallmarks of human language. Take the phrase the tree in the park. If the child mentally labels the park as an NP, and also labels the tree in the park as an NP, the resulting rules generate an NP inside a PP inside an NP -- a loop that can be iterated indefinitely, as in the tree near the ledge by the lake in the park in the city in the east of the state .... In contrast, a child who was free to to label in the park as one kind of phrase, and the tree in the park another, would be deprived of the insight that the phrase contains an example of itself. The child would be limited to reproducing that phrase structure alone. With a rudimentary but roughly accurate analysis of sentence structure set up, the other parts of language can be acquired systematically. Abstract words, such as nouns that do not refer to objects and people, -can be learned by paying attention to where they sit inside a sentence. Since situation in The situation justifies drastic measures occurs inside a phrase in NP position, it must be a noun. If the language allows phrases to be scrambled around the sentence, like Latin or the Australian aboriginal language Warlpiri, the child can discover this feature upon coming across a word that cannot be connected to a tree in the expected place without crossing branches (in Section , we will see that children do seem to proceed in this order). The child's mind can also know what to focus on in decoding case and agreement inflections: a noun's inflection can be checked to see if it appears whenever the noun appears in subject position, in object position, and so on; a verb's inflection might can be checked for tense, aspect, and the number, person, and gender of its subject and object. The child need not bother checking whether the third word in the sentence referred to a reddish or a bluish object, whether the last word was long or short, whether the sentence was being uttered indoors or outdoors, and billions of other fruitless possibilities that a purely correlational learner would have to check. 9.2 The Organization of Grammar as a Guide to Acquisition A grammar is not a bag of rules; there are principles that link the various parts together into a functioning whole. The child can use such principles of Universal Grammar to allow one bit of knowledge about language to affect another. This helps solve the problem of how the child can avoid generalizing to too large a language, which in the absence of negative evidence would be incorrigible. In cases were children do overgeneralize, these principles can help the child recover: if there is a principle that says that A and B cannot coexist in a language, a child acquiring B can use it to catapult A out of the grammar. 9.2.1 Blocking and Inflectional Overregularization The next chapter presents a good example. The Blocking principle in morphology dictates that an irregular form listed in the mental dictionary as corresponding to a particular inflectional category (say, past tense), blocks the application of the corresponding general rule. For example, adults know the irregular form broke, and that prevents them from applying the regular "add -ed" rule to break and saying breaked. Children, who have not heard broke enough times to remember it reliably on demand, thus fail to block the rule and occasionally say breaked. As they hear broke enough times to recall it reliably, Blocking would suppress the regular rule, and they would gradually recover from these overgeneralization errors (Marcus, et al., 1992). 9.2.2 Interactions between Word Meaning and Syntax

Here is another example in which a general principle rules out a form in the adult grammar, but in the child's grammar, the crucial information allowing the principle to apply is missing. As the child's knowledge increases, the relevance of the principle to the errant form manifests itself, and the form can be ruled out so as to make the grammar as a whole consistent with the principle. Every verb has an "argument structure": a specification of what kinds of phrases it can appear with (Pinker, 1989). A familiar example is the distinction between a transitive verb like devour, which requires a direct object (you can say He devoured the steak but not just He devoured) and an intransitive verb like dine, which does not (you can say He dined but not He dined the steak). Children sometimes make errors with the argument structures of verbs that refer to the act of moving something to a specified location (Bowerman, 1982b; Gropen, Pinker, Hollander, and Goldberg, 1991a): I didn't fill water up to drink it; I filled it up for the flowers to drink it. Can I fill some salt into the bear? [a bear-shaped salt shaker] I'm going to cover a screen over me. Feel your hand to that. Terri said if this [a rhinestone on a shirt] were a diamond then people would be trying to rob the shirt. A general principle of argument structure is that the argument that is affected in some way specified by the verb gets mapped onto the syntactic object. This is an example of a "linking rule," which links semantics with syntax (and which is an example of the contingency a young child would have employed to use semantic information to bootstrap into the syntax). For example, for adults, the "container" argument (where the water goes) is the direct object of fill -- fill the glass with water, not fill water into the glass -- because the mental definition of the verb fill says that the glass becomes full, but says nothing about how that happens (one can fill a glass by pouring water into it, by dripping water into it, by dipping it into a pond, and so on). In contrast, for a verb like pour, it is the "content" argument (the water) that is the object -- pour water into the glass, not pour the glass with water -- because the mental definition of the verb pour says that the water must move in a certain manner (downward, in a stream) but does not specify what happens to the container (the water might fill the glass, merely wet it, end up beside it, and so on). In both cases, the entity specified as "affected" ends up as the object, but for fill, it is the object whose state is affected (going from not full to full), whereas for pour, it is the object whose location is affected (going from one place to a lower one). Now, let's say children mistakenly think that fill refers to a manner of motion (presumably, some kind of tipping or pouring), instead of an end state of fullness. (Children commonly use end state verbs as manner verbs: for example, they think that mix just means stir, regardless of whether the stirred ingredients end up mixed together; Gentner, 1978). If so, the linking rule for direct objects would cause them to make the error we observe: fill x into y. How could they recover? When children observe the verb fill in enough contexts to realize that it actually encodes the end state of fullness, not a manner of pouring or any other particular manner (for example eventually they may hear someone talking about filling a glass by leaving it on a window sill during a storm), they can change their mental dictionary entry for fill. As a result, they would withdraw it from eligibility to take the argument structure with the contents as direct object, on the grounds that it violates the constraint that "direct object = specifically affected entity." The principle could have existed all along, but only been deemed relevant to the verb fill when more information about its definition had been accumulated (Gropen, et al., 1991a, b; Pinker, 1989). There is evidence that the process works in just that way. Gropen et al. (1991a) asked preschool children to select which picture corresponded to the sentence She filled the glass with water. Most children indiscriminately chose any picture showing water pouring; they did not care whether the glass ended up full. This shows that they do misconstrue the meaning of fill. In a separate task, the children were asked to describe in their own words what was happening in a picture showing a glass being filled. Many of these

children used incorrect sentences like He's filling water into the glass. Older children tended to make fewer errors of both verb meaning and verb syntax, and children who got the verb meaning right were less likely to make syntax errors and vice-versa. In an even more direct demonstration, Gropen, et al. (1991b) taught children new verbs like to pilk, referring to actions like moving a sponge over to a cloth. For some children, the motion had a distinctive zigzag manner, but the cloth remained unchanged. For others, the motion was nondescript, but the cloth changed color in a litmus-like reaction when the sponge ended up on it. Though none of the children heard the verb used in a sentence, when asked to describe the event, the first group said that the experimenter was pilking the sponge, whereas the second group said that he was pilking the cloth. This is just the kind of inference that would cause a child who finally figured out what fill means to stop using it with the wrong direct object. Interestingly, the connections between verbs' syntax and semantics go both ways. Gleitman (1990) points out that there are some aspects of a verb's meaning that are difficult, if not impossible, for a child to learn by observing only the situations in which the verb is used. For example, verb pairs like push and move, give and receive, win and beat, buy and sell, chase and flee, and drop and fall often can be used to describe the same event; only the perspective assumed by the verb differs. Also, mental verbs like see, know, and want, are difficult to infer by merely observing their contexts. Gleitman suggests that the crucial missing information comes from the syntax of the sentence. For example, fall is intransitive (it fell, not John fell the ball); drop can be transitive (He dropped the ball). This reflects the fact that the meaning of fall involves the mere act of plummeting, independent of who if anyone caused it, whereas the extra argument of drop refers to an agent who is causing the descent. A child could figure out the meaning difference between the two by paying attention to the transitive and intransitive syntax -- an example of using syntax to learn semantics, rather than vice-versa. (Of course, it can only work if the child has acquired some syntax to begin with.) Similarly, a verb that appears with a clause as its complement (as in I think that ...) must refer to a state involving a proposition, and not, say, of motion (there is no verb like He jumped that he was in the room). Therefore a child hearing a verb appearing with a clausal complement can infer that it might be a mental verb. Naigles (1990) conducted an experiment that suggest that children indeed can learn some of a verb's meaning from the syntax of a sentence it is used in. Twenty-four-month-olds first saw a video of a rabbit pushing a duck up and down, while both made large circles with one arm. One group of children heard a voice saying "The rabbit is gorping the duck"; another heard "The rabbit and the duck are gorping." Then both groups saw a pair of screens, one showing the rabbit pushing the duck up and down, neither making arm circles, the other showing the two characters making arm circles, neither pushing down the other. In response to the command "Where's gorping now? Find gorping!", the children who heard the transitive sentence looked at the screen showing the up-and-down action, and the children who heard the intransitive sentence looked at the screen showing the making-circles action. For a general discussion of how children could use verb syntax to learn verb semantics, and vice-versa, see Pinker (1994b). 9.3 Parameter-Setting and the Subset Principle A striking discovery of modern generative grammar is that natural languages seem to be built on the same basic plan. Many differences among languages represent not separate designs but different settings of a few "parameters" that allow languages to vary, or different choices of rule types from a fairly small inventory of possibilities. The notion of a "parameter" is borrowed from mathematics. For example, all of the equations of the form "y = 3x + b," when graphed, correspond to a family of parallel lines with a slope of 3; the parameter b takes on a different value for each line, and corresponds to how high or low it is on the graph. Similarly, languages may have parameters (see the chapter by Lasnik).

For example, all languages in some sense have subjects, but there is a parameter corresponding to whether a language allows the speaker to omit the subject in a tensed sentence with an inflected verb. This "null subject" parameter (sometimes called "PRO-drop") is set to "off" in English and "on" in Spanish and Italian (Chomsky, 1981). In English, one can't say Goes to the store, but in Spanish, one can say the equivalent. The reason this difference is a "parameter" rather than an isolated fact is that it predicts a variety of more subtle linguistic facts. For example, in null subject languages, one can also use sentences like Who do you think that left? and Ate John the apple, which are ungrammatical in English. This is because the rules of a grammar interact tightly; if one thing changes, it will have series of cascading effects throughout the grammar. (For example, Who do you think that left? is ungrammatical in English because the surface subject of left is an inaudible "trace" left behind when the underlying subject, who, was moved to the front of the sentence. For reasons we need not cover here, a trace cannot appear after a word like that, so its presence taints the sentence. Recall that in Spanish, one can delete subjects. Therefore, one can delete the trace subject of left, just like any other subject (yes, one can "delete" a mental symbol even it would have made no sound to begin with). The is trace no longer there, so the principle that disallows a trace in that position is no longer violated, and the sentence sounds fine in Spanish. On this view, the child would set parameters on the basis of a few examples from the parental input, and the full complexity of a language will ensue when those parameterized rules interact with one another and with universal principles. The parameter-setting view can help explain the universality and rapidity of the acquisition of language, despite the arcane complexity of what is and is not grammatical (e.g., the ungrammaticality of Who do you think that left?). When children learn one fact about a language, they can deduce that other facts are also true of it without having to learn them one by one. This raises the question of how the child sets the parameters. One suggestion is that parameter settings are ordered, with children assuming a particular setting as the default case, moving to other settings as the input evidence forces them to (Chomsky, 1981). But how would the parameter settings be ordered? One very general rationale comes from the fact that children have no systematic access to negative evidence. Thus for every case in which parameter setting A generates a subset of the sentences generated by setting B (as in diagrams (c) and (d) of Figure 1), the child must first hypothesize A, then abandon it for B only if a sentence generated by B but not by A was encountered in the input (Pinker, 1984; Berwick, 1985; Osherson, et al, 1985). The child would then have no need for negative evidence; he or she would never guess too large a language. (For settings that generate languages that intersect or are disjoint, as in diagrams (a) and (b) of Figure 1, either setting can be discarded if incorrect, because the child will eventually encounter a sentence that one grammar generates but the other does not). Much interesting research in language acquisition hinges on whether children's first guess from among a set of nested possible languages really is the smallest subset. For example, some languages, like English, mandate strict word orders; others, such as Russian or Japanese, list a small set of admissible orders; still others, such as the Australian aborigine language Warlpiri, allow almost total scrambling of word order within a clause. Word order freedom thus seems to be a parameter of variation, and the setting generating the smallest language would obviously be the one dictating fixed word order. If children follow the Subset Principle, they should assume, by default, that languages have a fixed constituent order. They would back off from that prediction if and only if they hear alternative word orders, which indicate that the language does permit constituent order freedom. The alternative is that the child could assume that the default case was constituent order freedom. If fixed-order is indeed the default, children should make few word order errors for a fixed-order language like English, and might be conservative in learning freer-word order languages, sticking with a subset of the sanctioned orders (whether they in fact are conservative would depend on how much

evidence of multiple orders they need before leaping to the conclusion that multiple orders are permissible, and on how frequent in parental speech the various orders are). If, on the other hand, freeorder is the default, children acquiring fixed-word-order languages might go through a stage of overgenerating (saying, give doggie paper; give paper doggie, paper doggie give; doggie paper give, and so on), while children acquiring free word-order languages would immediately be able to use all the orders. In fact, as I have mentioned, children learning English never leap to the conclusion that it is a freeword order language and speak in all orders (Brown, 1973; Braine, 1976; Pinker, 1984; Bloom, Lightbown, & Hood, 1975). Logically speaking, though, that would be consistent with what they hear if they were willing to entertain the possibility that their parents were just conservative speakers of Korean, Russian or Swedish, where several orders are possible. But children learning Korean, Russian, and Swedish do sometimes (though not always) err on the side of caution, and use only one of the orders allowed in the language, pending further evidence (Brown, 1973). It looks like fixed-order is the default, just as the Subset Principle would predict. Wexler & Manzini (1987) present a particularly nice example concerning the difference between "anaphors" like herself and "pronouns" like her. An anaphor has to be have its antecedent lie a small distance away (measured in terms of phrase size, of course, not number of words); the antecedent is said to be inside the anaphor's "governing category." That is why the sentence John liked himself is fine, but John thought that Mary liked himself is ungrammatical: himself needs an antecedent (like John) within the same clause as itself, which it has in the first example but not the second. Different languages permit different-size governing categories for the equivalents of anaphors like himself; in some languages, the translations of both sentences are grammatical. The Subset Principle predicts that children should start off assuming that their language requires the tiniest possible governing category for anaphors, and then to expand the possibilities outward as they hear the telltale sentences. Interestingly, for pronouns like "her," the ordering is predicted to be the opposite. Pronouns may not have an antecedent within their governing categories: John liked him (meaning John liked himself] is ungrammatical, because the antecedent of him is too close, but John thought that Mary liked him is fine. Sets of languages with bigger and bigger governing categories for pronouns allow fewer and fewer grammatical possibilities, because they define larger ranges in which a pronoun prohibits its antecedent from appearing -- an effect of category size on language size that is in the opposite direction to what happens for anaphors. Wexler and Manzini thus predict that for pronouns, children should start off assuming that their language requires the largest possible governing category, and then to shrink the possibilities inward as they hear the telltale sentences. They review experiments and spontaneous speech studies that provide some support for this subtle pattern of predictions. 10 Conclusion The topic of language acquisition implicate the most profound questions about our understanding of the human mind, and its subject matter, the speech of children, is endlessly fascinating. But the attempt to understand it scientifically is guaranteed to bring on a certain degree of frustration. Languages are complex combinations of elegant principles and historical accidents. We cannot design new ones with independent properties; we are stuck with the confounded ones entrenched in communities. Children, too, were not designed for the benefit of psychologists: their cognitive, social, perceptual, and motor skills are all developing at the same time as their linguistic systems are maturing and their knowledge of a particular language is increasing, and none of their behavior reflects one of these components acting in isolation. Given these problems, it may be surprising that we have learned anything about language acquisition at all, but we have. When we have, I believe, it is only because a diverse set of conceptual and methodological tools has been used to trap the elusive answers to our questions: neurobiology, ethology,

linguistic theory, naturalistic and experimental child psychology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of induction, theoretical and applied computer science. Language acquisition, then, is one of the best examples of the indispensability of the multidisciplinary approach called cognitive science. 11 Further Reading A general introduction to language can be found in my book The Language Instinct (Pinker, 1994), from which several portions of this chapter were adapted. There is a chapter on language acquisition, and chapters on syntactic structure, word structure, universals and change, prescriptive grammar, neurology and genetics, and other topics. The logical problem of language acquisition is discussed in detail by Wexler and Culicover (1980), Pinker (1979, 1984, 1987, 1989), Osherson, Stob, & Weinstein (1985), Berwick (1985), and Morgan (1986). Pinker (1979) is a nontechnical introduction. The study of learnability within theoretical computer science has recently taken on interesting new turns, reviewed in Kearns & Vazirani (1994), though with little discussion of the special case we are interested in, language acquisition. Brent (1995) contains state-ofthe-art work on computer models of language acquisition. The most comprehensive recent textbook on language development is Ingram (1989). Among other recent textbooks, Gleason (1993) has a focus on children's and mothers' behavior, whereas Atkinson (1992), Goodluck (1991), and Crain and Lillo-Martin (in press), have more of a focus on linguistic theory. Bloom (1993) is an excellent collection of reprinted articles, organized around the acquisition of words and grammar. Hoekstra and Schwartz (1994) is a collection of recent papers more closely tied to theories of generative grammar. Fletcher & MacWhinney's The Handbook of Child Language (1995), has many useful survey chapters; see also the surveys by Paul Bloom in Gernsbacher's Handbook of Psycholinguistics (1994) and by Michael Maratsos in Mussen's Carmichael's Manual of Child Psychology (4th edition 1983; 5th edition in preparation at the time of this writing). Earlier collections of important articles include Krasnegor, et al., (1991), MacWhinney (1987), Roeper & Williams (1987), Wanner & Gleitman (1982), Baker & McCarthy (1981), Fletcher and Garman (1979), Ferguson & Slobin (1973), Hayes (1970), Brown & Bellugi (1964), and Lenneberg (1964). Slobin (1985a/1993) is a large collection of major reviews on the acquisition of particular languages. The most ambitious attempts to synthesize large amounts of data on language development into a cohesive framework are Brown (1973), Pinker (1984), and Slobin (1985b). Clark (1993) reviews the acquisition of words. Locke (1993) covers the earliest stages of acquisition, with a focus on speech input and output. Morgan & Demuth (in press) contains papers on children's perception of input speech and its interaction with their language development. 12 Problems 1. "Negative evidence" is reliable information available to a language learner about which strings of words are ungrammatical in the language to be acquired. Which of the following would, and would not, count as negative evidence. Justify your answers. a. Mother expresses disapproval every time Junior speaks ungrammatically. b. Father often rewards Junior when he speaks grammatically, and often punishes him when he speaks ungrammatically.

c. Mother wrinkles her nose every time Junior speaks ungrammatically, and never wrinkles her nose any other time. d. Father repeats all of Junior's grammatical sentences verbatim, and converts all of his ungrammatical sentences into grammatical ones. e. Mother blathers incessantly, uttering all the grammatical sentences of English in order of length -- all the two word sentences, then all the three-word sentences, and so on. f. Father corrects Junior whenever he produces an overregularization like breaked, but never corrects him when he produces a correct past tense form like broke. g. Whenever Junior speaks ungrammatically, Mother responds by correcting the sentence to the grammatical version. When he speaks grammatically, Mother responds with a follow-up that merely recasts the sentence in different words. h. Whenever Junior speaks ungrammatically, Father changes the subject. i. Mother never repeats Junior's ungrammatical sentences verbatim, but sometimes repeats his grammatical sentences verbatim. j. Father blathers incessantly, producing all possible strings of English words, furrowing his brows after every ungrammatical string and pursing his lips after every grammatical sentence. 2. Consider three languages. Language A is is English, in which sentence must contain a grammatical subject: He ate the apple is good; Ate the apple is ungrammatical. In Language B, the subject is optional, but the verb always has a suffix which agrees with the subject (whether it is present or absent) in person, number, and gender. Thus He ate-3MS the apple is good (assume that "3MS" is a suffix, like -o or -ik, that is used only when the subject is 3rd person masculine singular), as is Ate-3MS the apple. (Those of you who speak Spanish or Italian will see that this hypothetical language is similar to them.) Language C has no inflection on the verb, but allows the subject to be omitted: He ate the apple and Ate the apple are both good. Assuming a child has no access to negative evidence, but knows that the language to be learned is one of these three. Does the child have to entertain these hypotheses in any fixed order? If so, what is it? What learning strategy would guarantee that the child would arrive at the correct language? Show why. 3. Imagine a verb pilk that means "to have both of one's elbows grabbed by someone else," so John pilked Bill meant that Bill grabbed John's elbows. a. Why is this verb unlikely to occur in English? b. If children use semantic context and semantic-syntax linking rules to bootstrap their way into a language, what would a languageless child infer about English upon hearing "This is pilking" and seeing Bill grab John's elbows? c. If children use semantic context and semantics-syntax linking rules to bootstrap their way into a language, what would a languageless child infer about English upon hearing "John pilked Bill" and seeing Bill grab John's elbows?

d. If children use semantic context and semantics-syntax linking rules to bootstrap their way into a language, what would a child have to experience in order to learn English syntax and the correct use of the word pilk? 13 Answers to Problems 1. a. No. Presumably Mother also expresses disapproval for other reasons, such as Junior uttering a rude or false -- but grammatical -- sentence. If Junior were to assume that disapproved-of sentences were ungrammatical, he would spuriously eliminate many grammatical sentences from his language. b. No, because Father may also reward him when he speaks ungrammatically and punish him when he speaks grammatically. c. Yes, because Junior can deduce that any nose-wrinkle-eliciting sentence is grammatical. d. Yes, because Junior can deduce that any sentence that is not repeated verbatim is ungrammatical. e. Yes, because for any sentence that Junior is unsure about, he can keep listening to mother until she begins to utter sentences longer than that one. If, by that time, Mother has uttered his sentence, it is grammatical; if she hasn't, it's ungrammatical. f. No, because we don't know what Father does for the rest of the language. g. No, because while we know whether the changeover in Junior's sentence is a "correction" or a "recasting," because we know what's ungrammatical (hence corrected) or grammatical (hence recast), Junior has no way of knowing that from his point of view, Mother just changes everything he says into different words. h. No, because presumably Father changes the subject on some occasions when Junior's sentence was grammatical but Father was just getting bored with the topic. i. No, because many of his grammatical sentences might never be repeated verbatim, either. j. Yes, because sooner or later Father will utter Junior's last word string, and Junior can see whether Father's brow was furrowed. 2. English (Language A) has to be hypothesized before Language C, and rejected only if a subjectless and suffixless sentence turns up in the input. That is because Language C is a superset of English; if the learner tries C first, nothing in the input will ever tell him he's wrong. Language B can be hypothesized at any point, and confirmed whenever the child hears a sentence with an agreement in it or disconfirmed when the child hears a sentence without agreement. 3. a. In English (and almost every other language), the agent of the action is the subject of an active sentence, and the entity affected by the action is the object. b. He would infer, incorrectly, that pilk means "to hold someone's elbows." c. He would infer, incorrectly, that English word order was Object-Verb

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Whorf, B. (1956) Language, thought, and reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Figure Caption Four situations that a child could be in while learning a language. Each circle represents the set of sentences constituting a language. "H" stands for "hypothesized language"; "T" stands for "target language." "+" indicates a grammatical sentence in the language; "-" indicates an ungrammatical sentence. http://reed.cs.depaul.edu/peterh/class/hon207/Readings/pinker-in-press.html Second Language Acquisition Theories: Overview and Evaluation Christina Gitsaki This paper presents some of the most influential theories of second language acquisition. The first part of the paper outlines some general distinctions and categorizations concerning the different theories as well as criteria for the evaluation of the various theories. A critical overview follows the description of each theory and its contribution to second language acquisition research.

INTRODUCTION Over the past three decades a number of different theories of second language acquisition have been formed in an effort to provide explanations as to how language learning takes place, to identify the variables responsible for second language acquisition and to offer guidance to second language teachers. Each theory accounts for language acquisition from a different perspective so some criteria are needed in order to classify and evaluate each theory. CLASSIFICATION CRITERIA: Theories of second language acquisition can be classified according to different criteria. According to their form theories can be classified along a continuum with deductive on one end and inductive on the other. Theories following the deductive approach contain concepts and constructs that are assumed to be true without proof. These are the axioms of the theory. Laws of logic are applied on these axioms to obtain the hypotheses of the theory. If these hypotheses are empirically supported then they become the laws and facts of the theory (McLaughlin, 1987:8). Unlike the deductive approach, the inductive approach does not begin with axioms. Instead it is empirically based. Theoretical statements are formulated after a significant amount of empirical relationships have been established. Theories that follow the inductive approach formulate hypotheses based on certain empirical facts (McLaughlin, 1987:9). With regard to the content, theories are distinguished into macro and micro theories. Macro theories in second language acquisition have a wide scope and cover a broad range of language learning phenomena. Micro theories deal with specific phenomena and they have a narrow scope (McLaughlin, 1987:9). For example, in the field of child second language acquisition, a macro theory would address a wide range of factors involved in the language learning process, while a micro theory would focus on a specific factor such as how children acquire a specific syntactic feature of the target language. EVALUATING THEORIES McLaughlin (1987) discusses two of the most basic criteria for evaluating a theory: its definitional adequacy and its explanatory power.

The term definitional adequacy refers to the concepts of a theory and their correspondence to some external reality. That is, the concepts of a theory should be defined in such a way so that ambiguity and confusion are eliminated and different people can interpret them in the same way (McLaughlin, 1987:12). The explanatory power of a theory is measured by the correspondence of the theory to the facts that the theory is supposed to explain. In order to enhance the definitional adequacy of theories, theoretical concepts are treated as synonymous with the operations that are necessary for their measurement resulting in operational definitions (McLaughlin, 1987:13). For example the operational definition for the term listening ability is the score that a learner achieves on a test designed to measure his/her listening comprehension. Furthermore, a theory should also have explanatory power. It should not only describe certain phenomena but also offer explanations as to why a certain phenomenon occurs. Here it is important that theorists do not over-estimate the truth-value of their theory (McLaughlin, 1987:14). Finally, a theory is validated by what it suggests and predicts as well as by what it affirms explicitly. In assessing the validity and usefulness of a theory one should consider the theory's correspondence to the facts and internal coherence as well as the predictions that the theory makes researchers are always interested in and look for theories that can generate hypotheses (i.e. predictions) (McLaughlin, 1987:17). In the next section of this paper, a number of influential theories in second language acquisition are outlined. THEORIES OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION Second language acquisition theories were developed along the lines of first language acquisition theories. Over the past three decades, studies in linguistics have focused on second language acquisition investigating how a second language is acquired, describing different stages of development and assessing whether second language acquisition follows a similar route to that of first language acquisition. A number of theories of second language acquisition were formulated, either deductively or inductively, and research in the second language classroom flourished. The Monitor Model Stephen Krashen's model is one of the most influential and well-known theories of second language acquisition. In the late 1970s Krashen developed the Monitor Model, an overall theory of second language acquisition, that had important implications for language teaching. Here are the five central hypotheses underlying the Monitor Model: i) The Acquisition versus Learning Hypothesis. Acquisition is a subconscious process, much like first language acquisition, while learning is a conscious process resulting into "knowing about language" (Krashen, 1982:10). Learning does not "turn into" acquisition and it usually takes place in formal environments, while acquisition can take place without learning in informal environments (Krashen, 1976, 1982). ii) The Monitor Hypothesis. Learning has the function of monitoring and editing the utterances produced through the acquisition process (Krashen, 1982:15). The use of the Monitor is affected by the amount of time that the second language learner has at his/her disposal to think about the utterance he/she is about to produce, the focus on form, and his/her knowledge of second language rules (Krashen, 1981:3-4). iii) The Natural Order Hypothesis. There is a natural order of acquisition of second language rules. Some of them are early-acquired and some are late-acquired. This order does not necessarily depend on simplicity of form while it could be influenced by classroom instruction (Krashen, 1985). Evidence for the Natural Order Hypothesis was provided by a series of research studies investigating morpheme acquisition orders.

iv) The Input Hypothesis. According to Krashen, receiving comprehensible input is the only way that can lead to the acquisition of a second language. If a learners level in a second language is i, he/she can move to an i+1 level only by being exposed to comprehensible input containing i+1 (Krashen, 1985). v) The Affective Filter Hypothesis. Comprehensible input will not be fully utilized by the learners if there is a mental block, i.e. the affective filter, that acts as a barrier to the acquisition process (Krashen, 1985). Krashen's Monitor Theory is an example of a macro theory attempting to cover most of the factors involved in second language acquisition: age, personality traits, classroom instruction, innate mechanisms of language acquisition, environmental influences, input, etc., but not without limitations. Despite its popularity, the Monitor Theory was criticized by theorists and researchers mainly on the grounds of its definitional adequacy. Gregg (1984) rejects the most fundamental of Krashens Hypotheses, the acquisition-learning dichotomy. Following a string of arguments, Gregg concludes that under normal conditions the Monitor cannot be used and since it is the only way in which learning can be utilized, there is no need to talk about two different ways of gaining competence in a second language. Criticism was also expressed by McLaughlin (1987). McLaughlin acknowledges Krashen's attempt to develop an extensive and detailed theory of second language acquisition but finds it inadequate in that some of its central assumptions and hypotheses are not clearly defined and thus are not readily testable (e.g. the acquisition-learning dichotomy is based on subconscious and conscious processes respectively, which have not been clearly defined by Krashen although he operationalized them in his studies (see Krashen, Butler, Birnbaum, & Robertson (1978) for an investigation of grammaticality judgments based on "feel" and "rule" for subconscious and conscious acquisition respectively), while other assumptions aiming to enhance the explanatory power of the Monitor Theory are not based on wellestablished theories and research (e.g. the Natural Order hypothesis). Furthermore, the role assigned to unconscious learning was found to be overestimated and exaggerated. Instead subsequent studies drew attention to the role of consciousness in second language learning and how much learners notice and what they think as they learn second languages. Despite the various criticisms, Krashen's Monitor Theory of second language acquisition had a great impact on the way second language learning was viewed, and initiated research towards the discovery of orders of acquisition. Interlanguage Theories The term interlanguage was first used by Selinker (1969) to describe the linguistic stage second language learners go through during the process of mastering the target language. Since then, interlanguage has become a major strand of second language acquisition research and theory. This section outlines the three main approaches to the description of interlanguage systems. According to Selinker (1972) interlanguage is a temporary grammar which is systematic and composed of rules. These rules are the product of five main cognitive processes: i) Overgeneralisation. Some of the rules of the interlanguage system may be the result of the overgeneralisation of specific rules and features of the target language. ii) Transfer of Training. Some of the components of the interlanguage system may result from transfer of specific elements via which the learner is taught the second language. iii) Strategies of Second Language Learning. Some of the rules in the learner's interlanguage may result from the application of language learning strategies as a tendency on the part of the learners to reduce the TL [target language] to a simpler system (Selinker, 1972:219).

iv) Strategies of Second Language Communication. Interlanguage system rules may also be the result of strategies employed by the learners in their attempt to communicate with native speakers of the target language. v) Language Transfer. Some of the rules in the interlanguage system may be the result of transfer from the learners first language. Selinker's description of the interlanguage system has a cognitive emphasis and a focus on the strategies that learners employ when learning a second language. A different approach to the theory of interlanguage was adopted by Adjemian (1976) in his attempt to describe the nature of the interlanguage systems. Adjemian argues that interlanguages are natural languages but they are unique in that their grammar is permeable (Adjemian, 1976). He also differentiates between the learning strategies that learners employ and the linguistic rules that are crucially concerned in the actual form of the language system (Adjemian, 1976:302). Adjemian (1976) concludes that the description of these linguistic rules that will reveal the properties of the learners grammar should be the primary goal of linguistic research. The third approach to the description of interlanguage was initiated by Tarone (1979, 1982). She describes interlanguage as a continuum of speech styles. Learners shift between styles according to the amount of attention they pay to language form- from the superordinate style in which attention is mainly focused on language form to the vernacular style in which the least attention is paid to language form. The new target language forms first appear in the more careful style and progressively move towards the vernacular style. The systematic variability of interlanguage systems is reflected to the variable effect which the different tasks and different linguistic contexts have on the learners use of syntactic, phonological and morphological structures (Tarone, 1982). Even though Tarone does not deny that other theories can provide explanations of second language acquisition, she argues that any adequate model of SLA [second language acquisition] must take IL [interlanguage] variation into account (Tarone, 1990:398). Different approaches were employed for explaining the acquisition of interlanguage and how learners discover and organize form-function relationships in a second language. Ellis (1985) argues that learners begin with forms which are used in free variation during the early stages of second language acquisition (non-systematic variability) until more organizing and restructuring has taken place (systematic variability). In contrast to Elliss claims, the functional approach to the analysis of interlanguage argues that discourse functions develop before grammatical functions and evidence is provided of the acquisition of function occurring without the acquisition of form (Pfaff, 1987). The role of the mother tongue (L1) in the acquisition of the target language (L2) was re-examined under the scope of the interlanguage theory and predictions were made about when the influence of L1 is greatest. Zobl (1980a, 1980b) investigated the L1 influence on L2 acquisition and argued that it is the formal features of L2 that control the formal aspects of its acquisition, including the activation of L1 transfer (Zobl, 1980a:54, 1980b). The approaches to the study of interlanguage, as described above, agree on two basic characteristics of interlanguage systems: interlanguages are systematic (systematicity either in the form of learning strategies the learners employ or linguistic rules that govern the learners' grammars), and dynamic (interlanguages keep changing until the target language system is fully acquired). The scope of these approaches is also common: interlanguage is seen as a kind of interim grammar gradually progressing towards the target language grammar. Morpheme studies were employed to describe the systematicity of interlanguage systems and also the various stages of interlanguage development until the target form is acquired. The interlanguage theories were inductively derived from studies following Error Analysis, the view that by analyzing learners errors we can predict the linguistic stage that a learner is at. However, Error Analysis as a mode of inquiry was limited in its scope and concentrated on what learners did wrong rather than on what made them successful (Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1992:61). In that respect, interlanguage theories are limited in their explanatory power.

Universal Grammar Theories Universal Grammar (UG) theories are based on Chomskys claim that there are certain principles that form the basis on which knowledge of language develops. These principles are biologically determined and specialized for language learning (Chomsky, 1969, 1980, 1986). Originally, UG theory did not concern itself with second language learning. It referred to the first language learner. Its principles though were adopted by second language researchers and were applied in the field of second language acquisition. UG was used in order to provide explanations for the existence of developmental sequences in interlanguage and to support the view of interlanguage as a natural language which is subject to the constraints of the Universal Grammar (Hilles, 1986:45). The use of UG for language transfer, fossilization and L2 pedagogy was also suggested. Evidence was provided that adults have some sort of access to knowledge of UG, and this knowledge is used in the development of foreign language competence (Bley-Vroman, Felix, & Ioup, 1988). A model very similar to Chomsky's Universal Grammar was proposed by Felix (1985). The Competition Model consists of two subsystems: the Language-Specific Cognitive System (LSC-system) and the Problem-Solving system (PSC-system) and it is responsible for the differences in the learning processes employed by children and adults. It is argued that the childrens learning process is guided by the LSC-system, while adults employ the problem solving module which then enters into competition with the language-specific system. Even though the LSC-system is governed by principles similar to the principles of the Universal Grammar, the principles of the PSC-system are largely unknown (Felix, 1985:70). Another UG based theory, the Creative Construction theory, was suggested by Dulay and Burt (1974). According to this theory children engaged in second language learning progressively reconstruct rules for the target language speech they hear guided by universal innate mechanisms which lead them to construct certain types of hypotheses about the system of the language they are acquiring until the mismatch between what they are exposed to and what they actually produce is resolved (Dulay & Burt, 1974:37). Empirical evidence from comparing the errors produced by Spanish children learning English with those produced by children learning English as their mother-tongue, showed that most of the syntax errors in English produced by the Spanish children were of the same type of errors made by children learning English natively (Dulay & Burt, 1973). Also, finding Spanish and Chinese children acquiring English morphemes in similar orders, Dulay and Burt conclude that it is the L2 system rather than the L1 system that guides the acquisition process (Dulay & Burt, 1974:52). The effect of the mother-tongue in determining the magnitude of the second language learning task is reflected in the model of the learning process that Corder (1978) suggested. According to this model the learner begins his/her learning task from a basic Universal Grammar (or built-in syllabus) which gradually becomes more complex in response to the learners exposure to target language data and the communicative needs he/she is faced with. This elaboration or complexification process follows a constant sequence for all learners of a particular second language, but the progress of any particular learner is affected by the degree to which his/her knowledge of the target language in the form of mothertongue-like features facilitates his/her learning process. In summary, Universal Grammar theories of second language acquisition were generated in order to provide explanations for empirical evidence and they were primarily concerned with the internal mechanisms that lead to the acquisition of the formal aspects of the target language and the similarities and differences between acquiring a particular language as a first or a second language. Although researchers have used UG to generate a number of interesting hypotheses about second language acquisition, and generative theorists regard UG as the best theory of grammar because of its descriptive and explanatory adequacy (Ellis, 1994:429), empirical evidence has been restricted to the acquisition of a small set of syntactic phenomena. A general theory of second language acquisition needs to cover a wider range of phenomena (McLaughlin, 1987:108). Cognitive Theories Psychologists and psycholinguists viewed second language learning as the acquisition of a complex cognitive skill. Some of the sub-skills involved in the language learning process are applying

grammatical rules, choosing the appropriate vocabulary, following the pragmatic conventions governing the use of a specific language (McLaughlin, 1987:134). These sub-skills become automatic with practice (Posner & Snyder, 1975). During this process of automatisation, the learner organizes and restructures new information that is acquired. Through this process of restructuring the learner links new information to old information and achieves increasing degrees of mastery in the second language (McLaughlin, 1987, 1990a). This gradual mastering may follow a U-shaped curve sometimes (Lightbown, Spada, & Wallace, 1980) indicating a decline in performance as more complex internal representations replace less complex ones followed by an increase again as skill becomes expertise (McLaughlin, 1990b). From the cognitivists point of view language acquisition is dependent in both content and developmental sequencing on prior cognitive abilities and language is viewed as a function of more general nonlinguistic abilities (Berman, 1987:4). Evidence against the cognitivist theory is provided by Felix (1981) who describes the general cognitive skills as useless for language development (Felix, 1981). The only areas that cognitive development is related to language development is vocabulary and meaning, since lexical items and meaning relations are most readily related to a conceptual base (Felix, 1981). A base in cognitive theory is also claimed by the interactivist approach to second language learning (Clahsen, 1987). The language processing model proposed by the interactivist approach assumes an autonomous linguistic level of processing and contains a general problem solver mechanism (GPS) that allows direct mappings between underlying structure and surface forms, thus short-circuiting the grammatical processor (Clahsen, 1987:105). The language acquisition theories based on a cognitive view of language development regard language acquisition as the gradual automitization of skills through stages of restructuring and linking new information to old knowledge. However, the differences between the various cognitive models makes it impossible to construct a comprehensive cognitive theory of second language acquisition and furthermore, as Schimdt (1992) observes: there is little theoretical support from psychology on the common belief that the development of fluency in a second language is almost exclusively a matter of the increasingly skillful application of rules (Schmidt, 1992:377). The last two theories dealt with in this paper, the Multidimensional Model and the Acculturation/Pidginization Theory, refer mainly to the acquisition of a second language by adults in naturalistic environments. Multidimensional Model In the Multidimensional Model, the learner's stage of acquisition of the target language is determined by two dimensions: the learners developmental stage and the learners social-psychological orientation. The developmental stage is defined by accuracy orders and developmental sequences, but within a stage learners may differ because of their social-psychological orientation, which is independent of developmental stage. Thus a segregatively oriented learner uses more restrictive simplification strategies than an integratively oriented learner who uses elaborate simplification strategies. The segregative learner is more likely to fossilize at that stage than is the integrative learner who has a more positive attitude towards learning the target language and a better chance of learning the target language well (see also Clahsen, Meisel & Pienemann, 1983). The Multidimensional Model has both explanatory and predictive power in that it not only identifies stages of linguistic development but it also explains why learners go through these developmental stages and it predicts when other grammatical structures will be acquired (Ellis, 1994:384). Although the Multidimensional Model has made important contributions to second language acquisition research, there are some problems with the falsifiability of its predictive framework, such as explaining how it is that learners learn whatever they manage to produce despite the processing constraints (see also Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991:285; McLaughlin, 1987:114-115). Furthermore, the Multidimensional

Model does not explain the process through which learners obtain intake from imput and how they use this intake to reconstruct internal grammars (Ellis, 1994:388). In this respect the Multidimensional Model is limited. Acculturation/Pidginization Theory According to Schumann (1978): second language acquisition is just one aspect of acculturation and the degree to which a learner acculturates to the target-language group will control the degree to which he acquires the second language. Schumann (1978). From this perspective, second language acquisition is greatly affected by the degree of social and psychological distance between the learner and the target-language culture. Social distance refers to the learner as a member of a social group that is in contact with another social group whose members speak a different language. Psychological distance results from a number of different affective factors that concern the learner as an individual, such as language shock, culture shock, culture stress, etc. If the social and/or psychological distance is great then acculturation is impeded and the learner does not progress beyond the early stages of language acquisition. As a result his/her target language will stay pidginized. Pidginization is characterized by simplifications and reductions occurring in the learners interlanguage which lead to fossilization when the learners interlanguage system does not progress in the direction of the target language (for a review see McLaughlin, 1987:110-112). Schumanns theory received limited empirical support. Among some of the criticisms that the acculturation theory received was that social factors are assumed to have a direct impact on second language acquisition while they are more likely to have an indirect one (Ellis, 1994:233). Also, pidginization is a group phenomenon, while language acquisition is an individual phenomenon. Finally, the acculturation model fails to explain how the social factors influence the quality of contact the learners experience (Ellis, 1994:234). SUMMARY The second language acquisition theories reviewed in this paper have paid attention to different aspects of the second language acquisition process and have provided valuable background and hypotheses for numerous research studies. All of the theories regard second language acquisition as a gradual process. Whether language learners use strategies, cognitive or innate mechanisms, they still have to progress towards the target language going through various stages of development. Although theories are primarily concerned with providing explanations about how languages are acquired, no single theory can offer a comprehensive explanation about the whole process of second language acquisition. Each theory offers a different insight in the complex process of second language acquisition. For example, during the era of developmental studies, Larsen-Freeman (1978), in an effort to provide an explanation for the morpheme acquisition order in second language learning, concludes that the morpheme frequency of occurrence in native speaker speech is the principle determinant for the morpheme order in the speech production of second language learners. However this conclusion seen under the light of different theories of second language acquisition can provide a number of different explanations. From the cognitivist's point of view this finding is evidence that the learner, in the process of testing his/her hypotheses about the target language system, has managed due to the frequency of occurrence of a particular L2 construction to refine his/her hypothesis about a specific L2 rule. Another explanation based on the affective factors influencing second language acquisition could suggest that the learners in their effort to match the gestalt of the native speaker input to which they are exposed, acquire and produce the appropriate morphemes in their speech (Larsen-Freeman, 1978). Larsen-Freeman (1978) concludes that there is not a single explanation that could work for all learners, and that different learners may rely on different strategies when learning a second language, depending on a number of different

variables such as the target language input they are exposed to, their cognitive style, their motivation, their proficiency in the target language, etc. The large number of second language acquisition theories shows the great interest that the study of second language acquisition has produced over the past three decades. Despite their controversies, the theories of second language acquisition managed to initiate various research questions and to shed light on a number of linguistic and cognitive processes that are part of this large jigsaw puzzle called second language acquisition. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank Dr. W. Acton and Mr. R. Taylor for reading this article in draft and for suggesting improvements. However, I remain solely responsible for the contents of this paper. REFERENCES Adjemian, C. (1976). On the nature of interlanguage systems. Language Learning, 26, 297-320. Berman, R. (1987). Cognitive principles and language acquisition. In C. Pfaff (Ed.), First and second language acquisition processes, pp. 3-27. Cambridge,Mass.: Newbury House. Bley-Vroman, R., Felix, S. & Ioup, G. (1988). The accessibility of universal grammar in adult language learning. Second Language Research, 4(1), 1-32. Chomsky, N. (1969). Linguistics and philosophy. In S. Hook, (Ed.), Language and philosophy. New York: New York University Press. Chomsky, N. (1980). Rules and representations. New York: Columbia University Press. Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin and use. New York: Praeger. Clahsen, H. (1987). Connecting theories of language processing and (second) language acquisition. In C. Pfaff (Ed.), First and second language acquisition processes, pp. 103-116. Cambridge, Mass.: Newbury House. Clahsen, H., Meisel, J. & Pienemann, M. (1983). Deutsch als Zweitsprache: der Spracherwerb auslandischer Arbeiter. Tubingen: Gunter Narr. Corder, S. (1978). Language distance and the magnitude of the language learning task. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2, 27-36. Dulay, H. & Burt, M. (1973). Should we teach children syntax? Language Learning, 23, 245-258. Dulay, H. & Burt, M. (1974). Natural sequences in child second language acquisition. Language Learning, 24, 37-53. Ellis, R. (1985). Sources of variability in interlanguage. Applied Linguistics, 6, 118-131. Ellis, R. (1994). The study of second language acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Felix, S. (1981). On the (in)applicability of Piagetian thought to language learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 3(2), 201-220 Felix, S. (1985). More evidence on competing cognitive systems. Second Language Research, 1(1), 47-72. Gregg, K.R. (1984). Krashens Monitor and Occams razor. Applied Linguistics, 5, 79-100. Hilles, S. 91986). Interlanguage and the pro-drop parameter. Second Language Research, 2(1), 33-52. Krashen, S. (1976). Formal and informal linguistic environments in language acquisition and language learning. TESOL Quarterly, 10, 157-168. Krashen, S. (1981). Second language acquisition and second language learning. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Krashen, S. (1982). Principles and practices of second language acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Krashen, S. (1985). The input hypothesis: Issues and implications. London: Longman. Krashen, S., Butler, J., Birnbaum, R. & Robertson, J. (1978). Two studies in language acquisition and language learning. ITL: Review of Applied Linguistics, 39-40, 73-92. Larsen-Freeman, D. (1978). An ESL index of development. TESOL Quarterly, 12(4), 439-448. Larsen-Freeman, D. & Long, M.H. (1991). An introduction to second language acquisition research. London: Longman.

Lightbown, P., Spada, N. & Wallace, R. (1980). Some effects of instruction on child and adolescent ESL learners. In R. Scarcella & S. Krashen (Eds.),Research in second language acquisition, pp. 162172. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House. McLaughlin, B. (1987). Theories of second language learning. London: Edward Arnold. McLaughlin, B. (1990a). Restructuring. Applied Linguistics, 11(2), 113-128. McLaughlin, B. (1990b). The relationship between first and second languages: language proficiency and language aptitude. In B. Harley, P. Allen, J. Cummins & M. Swain (Eds.) The development of second language proficiency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pfaff, C. (1987). First and second language acquisition processes. Cambridge, Mass.: Newbury House. Posner, M.I. & Snyder, C.R.R. (1975). Attention and cognitive control. In R.L. Solso, (Ed.), Information processing and cognition: The Loyola symposium. Hillsdale. N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum. Schmidt, R. (1992). Psychological mechanisms underlying second language fluency. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 14, 357-385. Schumann, J. (1978). Social and psychological factors in second language acquisition. In J. Richards (Ed.), Understanding second and foreign language learning: issues and approaches. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Selinker, L. (1969). Language transfer. General Linguistics, 9, 67-92. Selinker, L. (1972). Interlanguage. IRAL, 10, 209-231. Tarone, E. (1979). Interlanguage as chameleon. Language Learning, 29, 181-191. Tarone, E. (1982). Systematicity and attention in interlanguage. Language Learning, 32, 69-84. Tarone, (1990). On variation in interlanguage: A response to Gregg. Applied Linguistics, 11, 392-400. Zobl, H. (1980a). The formal and developmental selectivity of L1 influence on L2 acquisition. Language Learning, 30(1), 43-57. Zobl, H. (1980b). Developmental and transfer errors: Their common bases and (possibly) differential effects on subsequent learning. TESOL Quarterly, 14(4), 469-479. http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/eserv/UQ:9550/L2-theories.htm A Working Paper on Second Language Acquisition Research: Some Notes on Theory and Method Joseph Galasso San Diego State University 1999 Lecture I Linguistic Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition 1. Overview and Introduction

Behaviorism Approaches (Skinner) Interactive Approach (Piaget) Linguistic Approaches and the LAD (Chomsky) Leaping from L1 to L2

1.1. A Theory of L1 Acquisition

From Skinner to Piaget Much work in the 1950s among American Linguists sought to capture the nature of language and language acquisition either via Behaviorist Methods (Skinner's Stimulus & Response), or via Cognitive Maturationalism (Piaget). Chomsky's early work in the late '50s initially focused on discrediting both schools-of-thought (as witnessed in the famous debates: Skinner vs. Chomsky (Chomsky 1959), and Chomsky vs. Piaget (Piattelli-Palmarini: ed. 1980). Although it appears that Chomsky has been credited with the 'win' between the two sides of the debates--clearly behaviorism in its purest form was destined to failure--it is a mistake to suggest that Chomsky has entirely closed the book on the two models: both models contain special and intrinsic aspects which do well to explain some elements of language. Having said this, Chomsky's claim that the brain contains a separate module for language (viz., the language faculty) independent of cognition certainly heralded an important breakthough in how we understand the nature of language/ and language acquisition. => 1. Behaviorism (Skinner) The study of human behavior in observable stimulus response situations. Related to behavior models is the 'habit-formation' L2 theories such as theAudiolingual method of the 1960s. => 2. Cognitive-Maturation (Piaget) The study of observing and correlating language development via a maturational timetable specifically tied to cognitive skills: sensori-motor, preconceptual, pre-operational, operational, etc. Distinctions between Lexical vs. Functionalism (e.g., Bickerton's Proto-language) could roughly fall into such a scheme. Chomsky Linguistic theory can provide general frameworks within which data from child language acquisition can be analyzed. Theoretical considerations can unify otherwise disparate and seemingly unrelated data from language-acquisition studies to provide a more uniform account of children's linguistic knowledge. Conversely, theories of language acquisition constrain proposals about adult grammars by requiring that adult grammars be learnable within a relatively short period of time. Theories of adult language strive not only to be consistent with what is known about children's acquisition of language, but also theories help to establish an acquisition process which is not dependent on impossible learning--the Learnability Criterion. Thus, Second Language Acquisition Research should be guided by the same considerations as in L1 acquisition research--composing a unified account. An important difference however between L1 and L2 acquisition from a linguistic theory point of view is that in L2 acquisition, learners are confronted with the dynamics of having two (or more) linguistic systems at work (in one brain/mind). How is the conflicting knowledge resolved (multi-competence)? How is L2 knowledge 'learned/acquired' and then 'stored'? There are presently two major perspectives from which to view the relationship between theories of language and theories of second language acquisition: one involves claims regarding the impact of a theory of language on the development of a theory of second language learning, and the other involves claims regarding the use of second language data to test or develop a theory of language. 1. An adequate model of L2 is quite impossible without a coherent theory of language--as Chomsky (1981) has argued for L1 acquisition research. We illustrate this position with a discussion of Universal Grammar (UG). 2. Linguistic theory, because it is a theory of natural language, must be tested against second language data to be validated. Thus, any theory of language would be false if it failed to account for second language data.

The formal Generative Theory of Grammar (Chomsky) necessary component of a theory of second language acquisition. In the absence of a formal theory, we get not only informal description, but also a proliferation of ad hoc terminology that are unconstrained by any principle. By formulating precise formal rules for the generating of sentence, it is possible (in principle) to describe what it is that is acquired by a learner of a specific language, and what it is that must be cognized by humans by virtue of innate knowledge (Plato's problem). The formal rules behind The Principles & Parameters Theory (=PPT) (Chomsky) function in such a manner. Given this type of information, we are in a position to make fairly precise predictions about SLA where the second language (L2) in some respect differs from the native language (L1). 1.1.1 Chomsky's Universal Grammar (UG) Universal Grammar UG is taken to be the set of properties, conditions or whatever that constitute the initial state of the language learner, hence the basis on which knowledge of language develops. All languages constrained by UG are, by definition, 'possible' languages. Only UG constrains L1 acquisition. Language Acquisition Device (LAD): It is claimed that there is a language learning system (known as the language acquisition device) that constrains the possible grammars. Autonomy/Modularity: By Autonomy, we mean that grammatical competence--one's knowledge ('cognition') of the syntax, phonology and semantics of a language--is a separate mental system (contra the Reductionist position of Skinner, and to a lesser degree Piaget). Thus, grammatical knowledge is not simply a special case of more general knowledge. By Modularity, we mean that grammar, while autonomous, is not isolated from other mental systems, nor is it monolithic and undifferentiated (See Pinker 1984). Rather, we see language in its everyday usage as the result of the interaction of grammar with other mental systems. 1.1.2 Child Language Acquisition: PPT & Lexical vs. Functional Categories Principles & Lexical Categories (vs. Holistic Form and Function approaches) UG The initial state of the language faculty can be regarded as UG with all theprinciples & parameters present but unattached to any language (=S0). The final state is when UG has been transformed into one of its possible steady states (=St ). Hence, a grammar is a state of UG, not a product of UG (maturation). Innateness Some aspects of our linguistic knowledge are 'innate'--or genetically determined. As speakers, we know more about a language than is possible given its input. We come to a language with presupposed assumptions about how a language is structured. This pre-conceived knowledge is genetically endowed to us in the form ofUniversal Grammar. At the lexical stage (governed by UG), form and function does seem to behave on a 'one-to one level'--i.e., form=meaning. These rough principles are absolute and without parameterization--that is, all languages share in their properties. The following lexical categories are: 1)

Lexical Category => Verb (VP) => Noun (NP) => PrepP (PP) => Adjective (AP)

Token Sentence Type Daddy kick- ball. (A) Book... ...with daddy Red car...

(Some Omissions: Case, INFL, AGR, Possessive and Word Order.) Critical Period Closely associated with these principles is the notion of a Critical Period (Lenneberg). The idea being that there exists a cut-off threshold by which it becomes impossible to 'acquire' the parameterized form of a language. In such an event, all that is made available are the principles of UG. The best known example of this critical period is the case of a Genie (Curtiss: 1977) whose virtual isolation from any linguistic input resulted in her being permanently linguistically impaired. All that she was able to employ in her speech were the basic principles of UG--any attempt of establishing a parameterized (L1) language was fruitless. If we maintain this Critical Period Hypothesis, then maturational constraints on UG would suggest that re-parameterization is unavailable for the adult--UG may continue to be active though only Indirectly via an L1 overlap. Parameters & Functional Categories Although one sees the clear significance of form and function at the lexical stage of L1 acquisition, one would be hard pressed to explain form and function in more abstract /formal levels of language: namely, what, for instance, is the (discourse) function of grammatical gender, nominative case, or even third person singular 'S' ? Parameterization is defined in terms of a finite set of alternative values with which a given functional category can be associated. Cross-linguistic variation is therefore due to differences among the parametric values of functional categories. (NB. We can't escape from 'grammar'--albeit 'mere' grammar is not all there is to language--no matter how hard we try to subsume it either under more holistic ESL approaches, or under some other category like 'communication/discourse', grammar must eventually be tackled. Pure holistic teaching approaches rest on a failure/refusal to separate form from function, grammar from communication. The problem in SLA/ESL is that too many have tended to take the holistic position as a truism.) 2) Functional Category Case Tense/Agreement Word Order Token Sentence Type He/She kick-s a ball (vs. *him/her) She kick-s/ed, Tom's book (=poss), The car goes (=SV) vs. (*goes Car)

--Paper Insert Radford & Galasso 1998-Some Parameters: (see Gass et al.) Recent work regarding the role of specific L1 parameter settings in L2 learning have shown that indeed hypotheses positing some kind of L2 transfer seem to be correct 1. Pro-drop The L2 parameter option for Pro-drop does seem to transfer into L2. For instance, White (Gass et al.) found that French-speaking subjects (studying English as an L2) seldom failed to identify

missing pronouns--that is, pro-drop was marked (French is a Non Pro-drop language). Conversely, Spanish-speaking subjects had difficulty switching to the parameter setting of Pro as marked 2. Agr/Infl (See 1.2.2) 3. Word Order (See Galasso 1999: handout) 1.1.3 Questions to Consider: Q: How can we account for the protracted nature of L1 acquisition in children? Q: What are the qualitative differences between Functional and Lexical categories, and why should a child have relatively more difficulty in acquiring functional categories? (Cite some examples.) Q: What is behind the notion of a Principles and Parameters based Theory (PPT) of language? 1.2. A Theory of L2 Acquisition: Leaping From L1 to L2 For L2 acquisition, the situation of learnability is similar, but not identical to L1. It is clear, as it is for L1, that the evidence learners have from L2 input is insufficient for the appropriate determination of second language grammar. Researchers using the UG paradigm attempt to explain this L2 acquisition in a similar manner to L1 acquisition--via UG/Parameterization. Second language learners have access to universal principles--either or Directly, in much the same way as L1 acquisition.

Indirectly, through their L1,

Thus, a theory of L2 must make plain the interaction between innate linguistic principles and input so as to explain how a learner can arrive at a grammar of the target language

1.2.1 UG Accessibility The learner already has knowledge of ones (native) language and a powerful system of general abstract problem-solving skills. Within what general framework is the logical problem of foreign language learning to be addressed? And specifically, what is the role of the domain-specific learning system, including principles of UG? Does UG (LAD) continue to function in adults? => Position 1: Direct UG Access In the Direct UG Access Hypothesis, UG is just as active in L2 as it was in L1. There are no clear distinctions regarding UG--the differences may lie in the fact that now since parameters are set via L1, parameters in L2 must too either be set accordingly (whereas the two subsets of parameter settings set along side each other), where there must be some sort of parameter re-setting for L2. Like L1 acquisition, learners of the Direct Access Model are considered to be unaware of what they are learning (unconscious learning) and need nothing other than positive evidence (via natural input) to set the values of parameters and to instantiate principles. (Problem: Of course, it becomes difficult to explain the vast difficulties encountered in L2 learning under this model--what are these problems attributed to?)

L1 & L2 Input

=>

UG

Principles/Parameters--> -->

L1 and L2 Grammars

=> Position 2: Indirect UG Access One obvious possibility is that the innate system that guides child acquisition no longer operates in adult foreign language learning (or more weakly, that its operation is partial and imperfect. This would easily explain why L2 learning is often a difficult and ultimately unsuccessful task. This view is associated with Lenneberg's famous Critical Period Hypothesis. 1. Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (Bley-Vroman) argues against the position that adult and child language learning are fundamentally the same and rejects the notion that adults have access to UG via L2. He notes ten areas--including the lack of success, variation in goals, significance of instruction, etc. where adult L2 learning is unlike child language acquisition, and where it shows greater similarity to general adult problem solving. Bley-Vroman suggests that some universal principles are indeed available through the native language: i.e., the learner comes to the task of learning a L2 with a set of assumptions about the nature of language. Bley-Vroman draws clear distinctions between 'learning' and 'acquisition': acquisition refers to the unconscious internalization of knowledge, while learning refers to the conscious 'learning' of explicit rules (e.g., conscious memorization of grammar rules is held--correctly--not to be the same thing as developing real language acquisition). The differences between 'learning' and 'acquisition' or child vs. adult language acquisition could be articulated as follows: i. Internal: It is caused by differences in the internal cognitive state of adults vs. external factors. ii. Linguistic: It is caused by a change in the language faculty specifically, not by learning ability. iii. Qualitative: It is a qualitative difference, not merely quantitative. Lack/Variation of Success and the employment of learning strategies (lecture 2). 2. Indirect UG Access Model L1 Input => UG principles & Parameters => L1 =>L2 Grammar ^ L2 Input =>---------------------------------^ In the Indirect Model, positive evidence (input) is still the driving force--but reduced to the extent that L1 now serves somewhat as a filter to L2 obtainment: viz., the implicit knowledge of L1 mediates L2 throughout all the crucial stages of learning--particularly with regards to parameterization. This would suggest that certain L2 learners will have difficulties with alternative parameter settings--e.g., null subject language type L2 learners will have difficulties accepting the obligatory nature of overt sentential subjects (as in Spanish to English). (See Pro-drop below). The advantage of this model is that now we can suggest not just a quantitative difference, but more importantly a qualitatively difference in the way one learns L2 (contra the Direct Model). The Fundamental Difference/Indirect UG Hypotheses could be schematized as follows: children, not by

general change in

I. Child Language Acquisition a. Universal Grammar (innate access)

VS.

II. Adult L2 Learning a. Native L1 knowledge b. General cognitive problem solving systems

b. Domain-specific learning procedures

In conclusion Suppose that the original UG scheme is no longer available, the foreign language learner can, in a sense, reconstruct much of the UG principles via observing the L1 and the interaction between the L1 and L2. (An overlapping notion of L1 serving as scaffolding for L2 makes for a nice analogy here.) The adult language learner therefore constructs a sort of surrogate for UG--adding and overlapping onto the original template the native language. This native language must then be 'sifted': that which is likely to be universal must be separated from that which is an accidental property of L1. (These properties of L1 tend to skew the L2 acquisition toward an L1 bias. The notion of parameter (re-)setting is relevant here.) => Position 3: A Maturational UG Approach 1.Competing Cognitive System (S. Felix) Summary Felix has suggested that adults learning L2 do not suffer from a learning deficit, but rather from a learning excess. Felix claims that the more developed cognitive problem solving apparatus in adults actually gets in the way of natural language acquisition (as seen with L2 learning). Felix correlates Piaget's early child stage of concrete operations to the fact that young children can't operate abstract formal systems (=Radford & Galasso's 1998) Lexical VP Stage). Hence, what Felix is on about is the notion that L1 in children is automated via a Language Specific Cognitive system (LSC). This is equivalent to LAD that enables the child to acquire language even though her Problem Solving Cognitive System (PSC) is immature and inactive. Felix attempts to correlate and attribute that facts that (i) children acquire language--even though their cognitive (PSC) systems are undeveloped owing to their LSC)--with the fact that (ii) adults find it very hard to acquire language--in spite of a full-fledge cognitive (PSC) system. This explanation has the advantage that it attributes the decline in adult language learning to a specific cognitive development--the rise of formal operations. I. Child (Non-formal operations) LSC => LAD 'innate' (successful L1 acquisition/mastery) b. As LSC changes/matures into PSC (unsuccessful mastery of L2) VS II. Adult (Formal operations) a. No access to LSC (LAD) (Unsuccessful L2 master) b.PSC kicks in at puberty (General cognitive problem solving skills interfere with LSC/LAD learning-strategies are applied to learning L2).

--Insert Smith & Tsimpli on Cognition & L2 Acquisition--

2. Alternative 'States' Model of Language Acquisition (V. Cook) In this metaphor, the language faculty itself changes (or matures) with time--there is no separate UG, but a UG that steadily transforms itself: UG1..2..3 --> Input =>UG --> --> i. Principles (+ form in L1) ii. Parameters (+Settings in L1) iii. Vocabulary (+L1 lexical items) => (Lexical stage) (Functional stage) (Permissible L2)

(L2 learning would be subsumed under iii. here) Cook claims that a grammar is a state of UG, not a product of UG. The initial state of L2 is not zero because it already incorporates an L1. This approach is similar to an Indirect UG Access Hypothesis except for the fact that it assumes that UG matures. This view--in a more radical version--could also be taken as support for Felix's cognitive maturational model. => Position 4: No UG Access This position suggests that UG is unavailable for L2 learning. Some other cognitive (nonlinguistic) learning strategy must be activated. L2 under this model doesn't incorporate the principles or parameter settings of UG. (Problems: (i) Such a loosely constrained acquisition apparatus should entail what we call wild grammars--i.e., grammars that don't have a basis in UG. (ii) How can we account for studies supporting L2 transfer hypotheses?) L1 Input => L2 Input => UG Principles & Parameters => L1 Grammar Some other mental processes => L2 Grammar

1.2.2 Preliminary Results and Conclusions In the case of L2 UG accessibility, the four positions as outlined above predict very different outcomes for L2 language learning. => The first position (Direct UG Access) proposes that as long as the language faculty (or possibly the LAD) has been activated normally within due course for L1, then there is no reason to believe that it can't become active in the exact same way again. This model would suggests that adults do not necessarily need to be handicapped in learning L2--since no only is their Language faculty fully engaged (as was for L1), but in addition so is their more cognitive problem solving system mature. It is quite clear that this should make for relatively easy access to L2--without any substantial interference from L1. (Problem: We later see that this is not born out in L2 studies regarding L2 to L2 interference regarding parameter resetting, etc. See Lecture 2). => The second position (Indirect UG Access) initial gains the advantage in being able to account for the well known facts concerning L2 leaning difficulty, fossilizing, and general lack of success regarding acquisition. Clearly a qualitative difference must apply to the adult learning L2. Although this position

also assumes UG to remain active in the adult via the L1 grammar, UG doesn't however interact directly with the L2 input, but merely indirectly (as a filter) via the previously set parameterization of L1. In other words, parameters do not get re-set here, but merely serve as a guide-line in how to learn and develop a strategy for dealing with the parameter. Adults never loss their L1 parameterization for specific items, what they do is consciously manipulate what they knowof the input and map it onto an L1 UG. This model has the benefit in accounting for the many language transfer type errors found in the data. This is due to the fact that the learner will more often than not assume that the newly acquired language is similar to that of the native language. In other words, the learner simply assumes the L1 value of the parameter setting still holds for L2. => The third position (A Maturational UG) challenges the position that UG remains in a stable state throughout the speakers' life-time and adds the strongest support yet to Lenneberg's Critical Period. Taking a biological stance where maturation is most certainly the default, this view suggests that other cognitive means must be responsible for any language learning. (Problem: this model may in fact be too removed form UG--e.g., given such a model, how would we then account for any L1-L2 language transfer errors at all?) (The No Access Model clearly collides with theoretical issues regarding linguistic theory.) Conclusion: Experimental Design and Results (Galasso) There have been a number of recent studies to suggest that indeed L1 to L2 interference is common-place (cf. Flynn for Spanish & Japanese, Liceras for Pro-drop, and Schachter. (Eds) Gass and Schachter: 1989). The overwhelming data seem to point to a position that advocates some form of an Indirect UG Access. Galasso (in prep) likewise suggests that among Immigrant Spanish Learners of (level-0/1) English, L1 interference is so heavily influenced it often requires high intensity, explicit strategy instruction to break the 'L1 parameter grip'. The following examples indicate that parameterization--having to do with Spanish as a Null Subject language--is extremely difficult to dispense with.

1.2.3 Phonology (With Special Reference to Spanish L1 > English L2)

=> English Sound System (consonants) (Celce-Murcia) (b-d-g, p-t-k) => Spanish Articulation Problems (place & manner) => The Role of Context in Speech Comprehension: Unacceptable Collocations E.g., He *looks / cooks eggs. ( /k/ -> /l/ ) => Lexical vs. Functional Phonology: Morphophonemics E.g., Lexical "s" vs. Functional "s" ,-ed, * Sally wear- strange sock- (=3prs 'S') (Sally wear-s strange sock-s) (ESL omission of function s) *Sally- sock- are strange (=poss 'S') (Sally's socks are strange) => Drill Approximation E.g., i. Visit /v/ => Bisit /b/ ii. Family /f/ => fisit /f/ (targeting labio-dental fricative) Approximate to: iii. Fisit => Visit or /f/ => /v/ (targeting voiced)

1.3 Skills Assigned Readings in Celce-Murcia Speaking Listening Promoting Oral Comm. Skills Teaching Pronunciation Listening Comprehension in Second Language

Instruction A Synthesis of Methods for Interactive Listening

Lecture II Methods: Learning Strategies in Second Language Acquisition 2.0 Overview & Introduction In foreign language acquisition, different learners also follow different paths (cf. Meisel, Clahsen, and Pienemann: 1981). There is variation in what one might call learning strategies--from large scale

differences like the distinction between "avoiding" and "guessing", to something as specific as using very particular mnemonic tricks and devices to aid memorization of vocabulary, etc. These tactics resemble what one finds with general adult skill learning. Although there has been some question over whether or not formal instruction is a must for L2 acquisition--the fact that L2 can be learned as a pidgin reinforces this view--L2 studies seem to show that formal instruction does make a crucial difference in quantity and quality of language learned. This suggests that L2 learning is a type of general problem solving--e.g., cognitive models for problem solving. (NB. This questions L2 learning in the face of the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis that represents a clear difference between cognition and language modularities.) 2.1 Variation in Learning The lack of general guaranteed success is the most striking characteristic of adult language learning. In contrast to adults, children (L1) inevitably achieve (=acquire vs. learn) perfect mastery of the language. Well known chronic deficits include phonology (accent), vocabulary retention, function word usage, and syntax. This lack of general success typifies other characteristics of domain-specific cognitive adult learning: e.g., playing chess, bridge, the piano, etc. Any model (theory) that entails uniform success--as child L1 models must and do--is a failure as a model of adult language leaning. This is one reasoning behind the important contribution of an innate LAD for child L1 acquisition (one aspect of the Skinner vs. Chomsky debate). => Pidginized Systems: Some learners develop "Pidginized" systems or grammars to cope with their communication tasks. Although these devices do not in themselves constitute a real language (proper), they nonetheless are quite successful in communication. This variation of strategy learning has basically taken and separated those portions of a language which are made-up of more substantivemeaningful units--e.g., lexical categories--and have dispensed with the more formal non-substantive units--e.g., functional categories. (See lecture 1 Lexical vs. Functionalism in child language acquisition). --Insert Bickerton: Pidgin/Proto-language-=> Over Grammaticalization: In stark contrast to Pidginization, other learners tend to dwell on those more abstract and functional aspects of language--even to the detriment of their fluency. In other words, they place an extreme importance to formal grammar at the expense of practical speech. Such students often thrive on written examinations where grammar and paradigm memorization is at its optimum--while on the other hand, such students tend to dread more creative and oral spontaneous communication tasks. (NB. Recall that the word 'Pidgin' may actually be a borrowing from the English word 'Business'-showing that this system's main goal is to facilitate language exchanges in a basic level of communication for the market place.) Such variation in aims & methods follows naturally from the notion that L2 is an a posteriori adult learning skill akin to other cognitive skills. It is to be expected that different people will attack the required learning differently--depending on the aims and the goals of the student. Children, on the other hand, do not have the luxury of setting their own goals--their motivation for language is internally (innately) driven. => Fossilization: It has been long noted that learners of L2 eventually reach a stage of learning--a stage short of success--and that they then stabilize (fossilize) at this stage. Typically speaking, aspects of fossilization will mostly constitute some form of functionalism: e.g., English Nom. Case gender *He(=she), *Him(=her), or 3Psg 'S (She cook often). In children (L1), of course, there is no fossilization.

The above characteristics of foreign language learning tend to lend to the conclusions that domainspecific language-acquisition systems of children cease to operate in adults--and that adult L2 learning resembles general learning fields for which no domain-specific learning system is believed to exist. The best case scenario would hold that if adults function with some form of principled UG for L2, it would have to manifest itself at the very least Indirectly from UG--it seems that a more robust cognitive learning apparatus is behind the learning strategies discussed above. 2.2 Cognitive Theory in L2 Learning Linguistics and Cognitive Psychology each posit separate and different paradigms for describing L2 learning. While Linguistic Theory assumes that language is acquired/learned separately from cognitive skills (cf. Smith & Tsimpli), Cognitive Theory assumes that a crucial link exists between language learning and cognition--for examples, the development of information processing frameworks for memory, storage, selection, etc.). In this latter cognitive sense, language is ultimately tied to both IQ and cognitive skills. (NB. Cognitive Theory as presented here should not be misconstrued as pertaining or belonging to the Cognitive Approach which was heavily influenced by Chomsky himself vs. Behaviorist approaches).

2.2.1 L2 Strategies Declarative vs. Procedural Knowledge => Declarative knowledge is things (in the world) that we know about--that we have gained access to and can be stored in our memory. Such things are factual, experiential, emotional, etc. One defining aspect of Declarative Knowledge is that it can easily be pass-on (taught & learned) to people, generations and culture. This type of knowledge differs from Procedural knowledge in the sense that it can be negative or even disregarded. Procedural knowledge seems to have a more innate and biological nature. Declarative knowledge for L2 learning principally consists of the formal rules of language. => Procedural Knowledge (akin to cognitive skills) refers to the ability to perform or manipulate various mental procedures. The natural way a child uses the LAD (UG) to acquire language would be an example of Procedural knowledge. Consequences for L2 An interesting paradigm can be drawn here between (i) the natural way in which a child acquires her L1 (=Procedural), [and the way (ii) a person goes about learning an L2 (Declarative). Such a paradigm would enable us to give a quasi-cognitive explanation for the many persisting Quantitative & Qualitative differences found between L1 'acquisition' and L2 'learning' (as discussed in this paper)--namely, a declarative knowledge requiring much more cognitive scope & powers puts a heavier burden on the brain. (In other words, for the computer buffs among us: Declarative Knowledge is analogous to software (hence, it is easier to manipulate though much more prone to processing difficulties), while Procedural knowledge is hard/wired-ware (hence, it is virtually impossible to manipulate). => Following the argument above, a cognitive three-staged development can be sketched for L2 learning (O'Malley et al.: 25-27):

1. Cognitive Stage This first stage involves conscious activity in L2 on the part of the learner--what knowledge that is acquired is purely Declarative (vocabulary memory, grammatical rules, etc.) At this stage, L2 Interferences are at its maximum since L2 declarative knowledge is in one-to-one competition with its L1 counterpart. (L1 usually wins). => L2 is heavily influenced-dominated by L1 2. Associative Stage This second stage represents the trial & errors period in which L2 attempts to map onto L1. Errors of this kind start to be identified, analyzed and corrected--sometimes overcorrected. During this stage, the L2 declarative knowledge is beginning to be refined as procedural knowledge. A certain automacy develops in the L2--although declarative knowledge surfaces (prompting L1 interference type errors: vocabulary laps, grammar, etc.). => L2 is still influences but to a lesser degree. 3. Autonomous Stage Finally, Declarative knowledge is seeded as procedural knowledge--L2 performance becomes fine-tuned or even mastered. The L2 speaker becomes unaware of grammatical rules and may often code-switch the two languages between precise grammatical phrases.

=> L2 is seemingly incorporated into L1 => It is believed (cf. Anderson: 1980) that declarative knowledge can become proceduralized through practice. However, it may be that some types of declarative knowledge are easier to access and assimilate into procedural knowledge than others. => The Functional vs. Lexical categorical distinctions seem to play a role here in what first gets accessed in L2:

(i) Lexical items tend to be learned at the very earliest stage of L2 learning. (ii) Function items and more abstract grammatical elements tend to follow lexical items in protracted manner.

=> A maturational time-table for L2 Learning Relating what has been said above regarding Declarative vs. Procedural knowledge, a maturational time-table can be erected showing how the three stages above get assimilated in the brain of an L2 subject. Similar to L1 child language acquisition, L2 learners start with certain predisposed assumptions about how language works. The first maturational stage attempts to filter the L2 material in ways that are similar to L1--this, at times, has the consequence of trying to square a circle. As more declarative L2 knowledge gets filtered, more positive evidence becomes available to the subject, L2 to L1 inconsistencies become apparent. (This is consistent with parameter mis-settings, L1 interference, etc. The second maturational stage attempts to reanalyze the L2 data--from the starting point of L1. Cognitive Strategies for learning L2 show up here. The third and final stage (corresponding to the Autonomous stage) represents the point at which the subject assimilates the L2 declarative knowledge and makes it part of his/her procedural knowledge. L2 mastery takes place once L2 declarative knowledge gets assimilated roughly in the same manner as the L1 (innate) procedural knowledge (in child language acquisition).

(NB. Of course, the larger question here is--Does L2 Declarative Knowledge ever really get to the stage where we can claim it as Procedural Knowledge?) => Top Down vs. Bottom Up Processes Bottom-Up Fundamental processes which tend to rely solely on the one-to-one meaning relation (i.e., Iconic). (An example of this would be a child trying to memorize meanings of individual lexical items on a definition basis only--i.e., without collocation properties or context.) An Item is analyzed in isolation of its context+. Top-Down More advances processes that activate several specific types of information stored in memory in the form of contextual or experiential facts about the world. Adult L2 learners have vast amounts of Top-down capacities that can help in L2 learning. This clearly is not the case for L1 child language acquisition where any top-down material would come by way of innate knowledge (The LAD). 2.3 Skills Assigned Readings in Celce-Murcia => Reading => Writing => Grammar Academic Reading and the ESL/EFL Teacher Grammar in Writing Teaching Grammar

Lecture III Methods: Language Teaching Approaches 3.0 Overview & Introduction The section presents the various approaches and methodologies for ESL teaching. By examining the stages of L1 acquisition, and then by applying it as a feasible L2 learning apparatus, we hope to better understand the implications--benefits and shortcomings--of the various approaches. 3.1 A Survey of Current Approaches => Affective-Humanistic Approach (Curran, Galyean)

Meaningful Communication (input =output, filters) Zero resistance and low anxiety Individual learning at one's pace Class atmosphere more important than materials or methods

* Instruction methods should be designed around the concept of (i) breaking all known psychological barriers to learning while, at the same time, (ii) tapping and unleashing more successful forms of learning. => Comprehension-Based Approaches (Terrel, Krashen)

Focus on receptive skills first The two processes--sending & receiving--entail different tasks L1/L2 goes through a (stage-1) silent stage--focus on comprehension L2 learning is centered around extracting chucks of a language L1 is looked on as being similar to L2 in terms of motor skills (for the former) and production skills (for the latter)--a natural process is at hand Increase amount of language data processed per unit of time

* Instruction methods focus on establishing the core productions of speech--talking and comprehension are the key words here => Production-Based Learning Approaches (Bar-Lev)

Target language/structure is devised and presented in a way to maximize its natural simplicity. Although targets may seem somewhat unnatural to a native speaker (even though not ungrammatical), their mapping from L2 to L1 is enhanced The targets of all language instruction must always be authentic: grammar, pronunciation, etc. This goes against notions that L2 subjects will eventually iron out their language errors (fossilization) Meaningful speech production is the aim from the start.

* Instruction methods strive to facilitate early language usage in any way possible. => Cognitive Approach (Chomsky vs. Skinner, Pinker, Clahsen & Muysken)

Language learning is viewed as rule acquisition and cognitive--not habit forming Grammar must be taught--inductively (rules after practice) or deductively (practice after rules) Focus on Analyses of language

* Instruction methods incorporate what we have learned in the linguistic--psychological schools notably driven by Noam Chomsky. 3.2 An Integrated Approach => The Role of Teaching Literature in ESL/EFL Today

Vocabulary: Culture tied idioms and expressions vs. the universals of story telling. Grammar: Syntax in context--grammar analyses within the reading As a source for writing--rich context, as a springboard for personal writing, etc. Speaking may be pursued via oral presentation--with readings again serving as a springboard for individual presentation topics. Oral Reading: Oral presentations may be initiated as a writing assignment, and then carried over as a speaking presentation (with reading involved as an option). Group Activities

3.3 Approaches

Assigned Readings in Celce-Murcia => Approaches Language Teaching Approaches Cornerstones of Method and Names of the Profession Innovative Approaches

(Abstracts & Presentations) Some bulleted / (=>) notes are taken from out of context and are arranged as an abstract by Joseph Galasso strictly for purposes of teaching only. Appropriate coordinated references are given at the end of the paper. 1999 JosephGalassoSanDiegoStateUnivLing550 References Bickerton, D. (1990) Language and Species. University of Chicago Press Celce-Murcia, M. (ed. 1991) Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language. Heinle & Heinle Pub. Chomsky, N. (1959) Review of B.F. Skinner Verbal Behavior. Language, 35, 26-58. -----(1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass. Press. -----(1981) 'Principles and Parameters in Syntactic Theory'. In Explanation in Linguistics: problem of language acquisition. (eds) N. Hornstein and D. Lightfoot. Longman: London. The logical

Clahsen, H. & Muysken, P. (1986) 'The Availability of Universal Grammar to Adult and Child Learners'. Second Language Research. 2, 93-119 Cook, V.J. (1988) Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction. Blackwell: Oxford. (ms. 1994) The Metaphor of Access to Universal Grammar in L2 Learning. University of Essex (Appears in Implicit and Explicit Learning of Language: Academic Press. isbn 0-12-237475-4) Felix, S. (1981) 'On the (in)applicability of Piagetian thought to language learning'. Studies in Second Language Acquisition. 3: 201-20. Galasso, J. (1999) Interference in Second Language Acquisition: A Case Study into the Functional Categories (Spanish to English). Gass, S. & Schachter, J. (1989) Lenneberg, E. (1967) Biological Foundations of Language. Wiley Press: New York. Meisel, J. Clahsen, H. Pienemann, M. (1981) 'On determining developmental stages in natural second language acquisition'. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 3:109-35 O'Malley, J.M. & Chamot, A.U. (1990) Learning Strategies in Second Language Cambridge University Press. Acquisition. Transfer of

Piatelli-Parmarini (ed. 1980) Language and Learning: the debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Routledge & Kegan Paul: London. Pinker, S. (1984) Language Learnability and Language Development. Harvard Univ. Press: Cambridge, Mass Radford, A. (1990) Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax: The Nature of Early Child Grammars in English. Blackwell: Oxford. Radford, A. & Galasso, J. (1998) 'Children's Possessive Structures: A Case Study'. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics. 19, April 1998 Smith, N. I.M. Tsimpli (1995) The Mind of a Savant: Language Learning and Blackwell: Oxford. http://www.csun.edu/~galasso/wkpap.htm Modularity.

October - 2003

Second Language Acquisition Theories as a Framework for Creating Distance Learning Courses Eileen N. Florida Atlantic University, USA Ariza and Sandra Abstract Moore and Kearsley (1996) maintain distance educators should provide for three types of interaction: a) learner-content; b) learner-instructor; and c) learner-learner. According to interactionist second language acquisition (SLA) theories that reflect Krashens theory (1994) that comprehensible input iscritical for second language acquisition, interaction can enhance second language acquisition and fluency. Effective output is necessary as well. We reviewed the research on distance learning for second language learners and concluded that SLA theories can, and should, be the framework that drives the development of courses for students seeking to learn languages by distance technology. This article delineates issues to consider in support of combining SLA theories and research literature as a guide in creating distance language learning courses. Keywords: Distance learning; second language acquisition and distance learners; interactionist second language learning; ESOL and distance learning; SLA theories and creating distance-learning courses; language learning and distance technology Second Language Acquisition Theories as a Framework for Creating Distance Learning Courses Following the trend of distance learning courses in other domains, distance learning courses for second or foreign language learners are on the rise throughout the world, thus confirming the prediction that distance learning will soon become the hottest education fad in decades (Gonzalez, 1997, p. 8). Fad or not, the boom in language distance learning opportunities is evidenced by the number of search results evoked by searching Daves ESL Cafe ( www.eslcafe.com/) and other language search engine sites. Much of the appeal of distance courses stems from their ability to provide access to individuals who are Hancock

motivated to learn or improve proficiency in another language, but who are geographically isolated or restricted by work, schedules, and/or other considerations. Current thought about distance learning calls for courses to be designed in ways that follow the constructivist philosophy in which learners are seen as constructors of their own knowledge through active participation in the learning process, using computers as a problem-solving tool (Dixon-Krauss, 1996; Gavelek and Raphael, 1996; Lapp, 2000; Passerini and Granger, 2000; Willis, Stephens, and Matthew, 1996). This type of learning is based on ample interaction in the learning process that allows students to resolve cognitive quandaries through concrete experience, collaborative discourse, and reflection (Brooks and Brooks, 1993). Moore and Kearsley (1996) maintain that distance educators should provide for three types of interaction: a) learner-content, b) learner-instructor, and c) learner-learner. According to interactionist second language acquisition (SLA) theories, two-way interaction is critical in learning a second language (Pica, 1996). Interaction must consist of comprehensible input (Krashen, 1985, 1994), which allows the message to be understood, as well as output (Swain, 1995), which provides opportunities for expression and negotiation of meaning. When distance second language course design and practice adhere to quality distance learning pedagogy and are driven by SLA theories and research, the subsequent courses can provide learners with opportunities to acquire other languages in more flexible and accessible settings than traditional classrooms and language labs. In this article, we discuss SLA innatist and interactionist theories and research to examine the appropriateness of using Moore and Kearsleys distance learning interaction model to design lessons for second language learners. Due to the paucity of research about interaction and distance language courses, we include literature that highlights computer-assisted language learning in English as a second language (ESL) and foreign language traditional classrooms and language laboratory settings. We have taken this approach to the literature because of the potential application to distance learning practice and the possible influence it can have in defining a second language distance learning research agenda. To better understand the issues and ramifications of language acquisition on distance learning courses, we begin this discourse by presenting an overview of major second language acquisition theories that advance the notions of comprehensible input, comprehensible output, and interaction, differentiating this term from Moore and Kearsleys usage of interaction. SLA Theories Theorists place different values on the role of interaction in second language acquisition (SLA). Krashens (1985, 1994) theory became a predominant influence in both second language teaching practice and later theories. Krashen postulates that SLA is determined by the amount of comprehensible input, that is, one-way input in the second language that is both understandable and at the level just beyond the current linguistic competence of learners. Similar to Vygotskys zone of proximal development (1962), Krashens scaffolding theory is referred to as i+1. Viewed as an innatist perspective, this theory maintains that a second language is acquired unconsciously in a manner similar to the acquisition of a first language. According to Krashen (1996), acquiring language is predicated upon the concept of receiving messages learners can understand (1996). Teachers can make language input comprehensible through a variety of strategies, such as linguistic simplification, and the use of realia, visuals, pictures, graphic organizers, and other current ESOL strategies. While Krashen (1994) believes that only one-way comprehensible input is required for SLA, others take an interactionist position acknowledging the role of two-way communication. Pica (1994), Long (1985),

and others assert that conversational interaction facilitates SLA under certain conditions. According to Lightbrown and Spada (1999), When learners are given the opportunity to engage in meaningful activities they are compelled to negotiate for meaning, that is, to express and clarify their intentions, thoughts, opinions, etc., in a way which permits them to arrive at a mutual understanding. This is especially true when the learners are working together to accomplish a particular goal . . . (p. 122). Pica (1994) goes on to say that negotiation is defined as modification and restructuring that occurs when learners and their interlocutors anticipate, perceive, or experience difficulties in message comprehensibility (p.495). A variety of modifications, which may involve linguistic simplification as well as conversational modifications such as repetition, clarification, and conformation checks, may be used to gain understanding. The interaction hypothesis of Long and Robinson (as cited in Blake, 2000) suggests that when meaning is negotiated, input comprehensibility is usually increased and learners tend to focus on salient linguistic features. Cognizance of these language forms and structures is seen as beneficial to SLA. Other interactionist theorists apply Vygotskys socio-cultural theory of human mental processing to define the role of interaction in SLA (Lightbrown and Spada, 1999) and hypothesize that second language learners gain proficiency when they interact with more advanced speakers of the language, for example, teachers and peers. Scaffolding structures such as modeling, repetition, and linguistic simplification used by more proficient speakers are believed to provide support to learners, thus enabling them to function within their zones of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1962). Although theorists adhering to interactionist thought consider both input to, and input from, the learner as important, output is often viewed as secondary. However, Swain (1995) in her comprehensible output hypothesis asserts that output is also critical and hypothesizes that it serves four primary functions in SLA: 1) enhances fluency; 2) creates awareness of language knowledge gaps; 3) provides opportunities to experiment with language forms and structures; and 4) obtains feedback from others about language use. Comprehensible output assists learners in conveying meaning while providing linguistic challenges; that is, . . . in producing the L2 (the second, or target language), a learner will on occasion become aware of (i.e., notice) a linguistic problem (brought to his/ her attention either by external feedback or internal feedback). Noticing a problem pushes the learner to modify his/ her output. In doing so, the learner may sometimes be forced into a more syntactic processing mode than might occur in comprehension (Swain and Lapkin in Chapelle, 1997, p. 2b). From this perspective, comprehensible output plays an important role in interaction. In summary, interactionists elaborate upon the innatist notion of comprehensible input explaining that interaction, constructed via exchanges of comprehensible input and output, has at least an enhancing effect when meaning is negotiated and support structures are used. Based on this premise, distance second language learning courses should be designed to provide interaction that includes negotiation of meaning where comprehensible output results from input. Using SLA Theory and Research for Quality Design of Distance Language Courses SLA theory and research can be useful in designing quality second language distance education courses when applied to the three-component model of distance learning interaction supported by Moore and Kearsley (1996). By reviewing the literature, we can determine implications for developing distance education courses that are most appropriate for the learning of a second language. Moore and Kearsley (1996) describe three types of interaction that they believe should be integrated in distance learning courses in general. We offer an overview of each category and make reference to

complementary SLA literature that supports the interactionist SLA view. Based on their overlap, the information can be helpful in generating and establishing distance second language course practice. Learner - Content Interaction According to Moore and Kearsley (1996), a major role of the distance educator is to present appropriate content and to promote interaction between this content and the learner in ways that will cause the learner to construct knowledge through a process of personally accommodating information into previously existing cognitive structures (p. 128). Such interaction should induce the learner to develop new or modified knowledge and skills. In addition to textual materials used to present subject matter via distance learning, a wide array of options exist such as audio and video recordings, computer software, radio and television broadcasts, and interactive media such as CD-ROM and videodiscs. Learner-content interaction cannot occur if learners do not understand the content; therefore, a critical design feature for second language learners includes comprehensible input. Creed and Koul (1993), among others, developed two models, the concurrent model and the integrated model, that make the meaning of text more accessible in materials for non-native speakers. Components of the concurrent model include attention to vocabulary selection, text form and rhetorical structure, and learner support. The integrated model calls for the use of illustrations, explications, and a variety of genres to provide motivation and increase accessibility. Graddol (1993) points out that many language issues need to be addressed to ensure learner understanding. He counsels that the linguistic and communicative competence of learners needs to be determined, such as familiarity of particular discourses, including the media discourses of distance learning. Cultural issues pertaining to the subject matter, prior knowledge, and nonverbal language issues may also affect understanding. Diaz-Rico and Weed (2002) suggest that teachers find out about the cultural background of students. Additionally, implications of page design and visual representations should be considered in course design. Warschauer (1998) finds that the use of strategies such as re-reading the text, soliciting help, or using a dictionary aids the comprehension of text-based, computer-mediated discussions. Anderson (2002) maintains that the teaching of meta-cognitive strategies can help students develop stronger language learning skills. Because of the limited skills of beginners to access materials in the target language, Lambert (1991) believes that distance instruction is best suited for learners with intermediate and advanced second language skills. However, Davis (as cited in Boyle, 1995) maintains that audio and videocassettes provide comprehensible input for beginners and thus may mitigate anxiety. Krashens (1985) insistence upon a non-threatening environment to facilitate language acquisition by lowering the affective filter is yet another strategy to enhance learning for both beginners and advanced language learners. The use of multimedia may provide additional support for comprehension and also accommodate different learning styles. For example, an individual who needs more cooperative learning to interact with others, may respond better to an assignment that necessitates group communication (e.g., synchronous activities, group discussions), while a more field independent individual might prefer an individual assignment with time to be introspective (Savard, Mitchell, Abrami, and Corso, 1995). Software programs that have inherent learner-content interaction, such as one described by Chapelle (1997) in which the computer acts as a participant while learners construct questions about past actions to solve a crime mystery. The computer responds to moves and queries, asking for clarification when it does not understand. Such computer-assisted language learning activities have pragmatic and linguistic objectives structured into tasks to allow second language learners to learn while doing. Distance second language course designers should plan for interaction that results in the use of targeted language objectives, allowing learners to practice new forms, functions, and structures.

Another software program described by Chapelle (1997) uses hotspots that learners click when they do not understand idioms. This technique helps make input comprehensible and may also cause learners to notice form, which is beneficial in language acquisition. This and other computer-assisted language learning practices, such as highlighting forms and signaling when errors occur, may be integrated in learning applications. Chapelle cautions that using links to provide lexical meanings does not provide appropriate interaction because it does not require comprehensible output from learners. Activities should be planned so that they provide interaction demanding comprehensible output in the form of learners attending to and modifying problematic forms. Learner-content interaction can occur through cooperative learning activities while providing opportunities to develop linguistic and communicative competence. In Blakes study (2000), findings indicated that the cooperative learning strategy called jigsaw is superior to information gap, decisionmaking, and opinion tasks. Jigsaw activities combine learner-content interaction with learner-learner interaction. Learner - Instructor Interaction According to Moore and Kearsley (1996), most learners regard learner-instructor interaction in distance learning environments as essential. The instructors role is to present content and then maintain the learners motivation and interest, while assisting them as they interact with the content. Individualized attention is essential because it addresses the needs, motivation, and performance of each individual learner. The instructors responses to learners application of content are seen as especially valuable, as they provide constructive feedback concerning learners achievement of instructional objectives. In distance learning environments, the instructor acts as facilitator, providing guidance and support while presenting content in ways that encourage engagement. Creed and Koul (1993) recommend that the instructor help to make linguistic features and content comprehensible. Repetition, comprehension checks, and other strategies can be used in learner-instructor interactions to negotiate meaning. Even though techniques may be embedded in course design and strategies explicitly taught to learners, some learners might need additional assistance in order to increase their understanding and reduce anxiety. In discussing asynchronous computer-mediated-interaction, Lamy and Goodfellow (1999) remind instructors that self-sustaining threads arise in response to questions deemed worth asking by the learning community, but these questions may not necessarily coincide with those deemed worth asking by the teacher (p. 57). Recognizing that formal learning programs require that a syllabus be followed, Lamy and Goodfellow caution that this situation may cause the dialogue to be controlled by the teacher, which discourages learner reflection and facilitative interaction. A goal of their online course was to discuss language and learning strategies. As a result of this emphasis, findings indicated that learners engaged in what they termed reflective conversations. Although online instructors did not control the shifts in topics of the postings, they did encourage students to talk about words, which did provide adequate control while allowing learners certain freedom. In addition, instructors interrupted on occasion to re-focus students on form, a practice that, according to Chapelle (1997), causes learners to notice form without interfering with the overall communicative goal. Because of this input, Lamy and Goodfellow believe that students viewed instructors as experts who modeled language use, which they hypothesized would encourage learners to practice these terms and phrases. Learner - Learner Interaction Moore and Kearsley (1996) describe learner-learner interaction in distance education as interlearner interaction, interaction between one learner and other learners, alone or in group settings, with or without the real time presence of an instructor (p. 131). They point out that younger learners may find this more

stimulating and motivating than adult and advanced learners. Different types of learner-learner interaction should be thoughtfully planned to address goals. For example, inter-learner discussion can promote reflection about content, while group settings are appropriate for other types of collaborative projects. Many researchers believe that computer-mediated interaction for second language learners has beneficial features (Blake, 2000; Lamy and Goodfellow, 1999; and Warschauer, 1998). Warschauer believes it is less threatening than face to face interaction and may encourage risk taking while allowing students to set their own pace. In addition, it allows learners to have access to their texts, which can be later analyzed (Lamy and Gooddfellow, 1999; Warschauer, 1998) as well as provide an equalization effect on participation. Warschauer (1998), citing his own study, found that computer-mediated interaction has greater syntactical and lexical complexity than face to face exchanges, which may be as a result of increased planning time. Citing the findings and conclusions of Pellettieris study of interactional modifications in synchronous electronic discussion by intermediate level learners, Warschauer also infers that computer-mediated interaction is more beneficial than oral exchanges because the extended time to process and view language increases the possibility that learners will monitor and edit their speech (Krashen, 1985), resulting in interlanguage of higher quality. Blake (2000) is convinced that computermediated interaction is similar to face to face interaction, and is without the temporal and spatial constraints imposed by the classroom (p. 132). Lamy and Goodfellow (1999) suggest that asynchronous computer-mediated-interaction may be better for encouraging meta-linguistic reflection, because it allows learners more time to think about their own and others messages. Based on their study, Lamy and Goodfellow argue that reflective conversation . . . that is, computer-mediated asynchronous discussion around language topics and language-learning issues (p. 43), should be integrated in the design of distance second language courses. It is seen as beneficial because it has features that facilitate SLA, including negotiation of meaning and attention to form and strategy use. Lamy and Goodfellow (1999) also found that for learners to be effective in asynchronous chat settings, they needed linguistic skills that enabled them to produce texts that: Are well formed and unambiguous not only linguistically but also as pieces of interactive discourse . . . [and] move the topic on in a way that takes account of what precedes and creates curiosity for what might follow, that is, that contains the combination of familiarity and unpredictability typical of contingent interaction (p. 54). These points made by Lamy and Goodfellow suggest that this type of activity may not be appropriate for beginning second language learners, a view supported by Lambert (1991) in referring to distance second language courses overall. Designers of distance language learning courses should consider learner, pragmatic, and linguistic goals in planning learner-learner interaction tasks. Chapelle (1997) reminds us that the type of learner goal affects the interaction. Communicative goals focus on the construction and interpretation of linguistic meaning, while non-communicative goals focus strictly on form. Embedding language function and linguistic objectives in interaction offers learners opportunities to develop linguistic and communicative competence. Conclusion Based on this review of literature, SLA theory, research, and practice, an interactionist model may be applied to Moore and Kearsleys three-component distance education interaction model (1996). If these factors are considered, distance second language courses appear to hold promise for providing students

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