ENG504 Grand Quiz Preparation

10. Universal Grammar and First Language Acquisition

•  On the basis of messy input, children create mental representation of language which goes beyond the input they are exposed to and is very similar to that of other native speakers of the same language variety.
•  Language is the most abstract piece of knowledge.
•  Second language learners are cognitively mature and presumably much more resourceful in problem solving and dealing with abstract concepts.
•  From a theoretical point of view, different possible scenarios are open to consideration; for example, SL grammars are constrained by universal grammar (UG) UG does not constrain SL grammar or UG is impaired
•  UG approach is concerned with knowledge of language called ‘competence.’
•  It is not about performance, about how language is used in real life.
•  A complete theory of language also has to define how we access our knowledge base and how it relates to a number of sociolinguistic and psychological variables.
•  Chomsky acknowledges this and has been concerned almost exclusively with addressing the first two issues.
•  Notion of an innate language faculty in children argues that children go through developmental stages which are very similar across children of given language though progress rate varies.
•  These stages are similar across languages.
•  Child language is said to be rule-governed and systematic; they are resistant to correction and have limited processing capacity.
•  Universalists do not conclude that there must be a specific language module in the brain.
•  It does not seem to be linked in any clear way to intelligence.
•  In fact, children vary in the age at which they go through these developmental steps and in how fast they go through each stage.
•  Furthermore, many children with cognitive deficit develop language normally.
•  As there are numerous examples of people with cognitive disabilities or difficulties who performed well in language(s), evidence of opposite is also found.
•  There are many cognitively ‘normal’ children with impaired language condition known as ‘specific language impairment.’
•  A study suggests that some aspects of language at least might be genetically controlled.
•  Damage to left hemisphere of the brain also results in language deficit.
•  Language and cognition seem to be largely separate but they do interact.

11. Universal Grammar and Second Language Learning

•  The evidence posits that there must be some kind of innate language faculty that is biologically triggered.
•  Lenneberg (1967) outlined characteristics that are typically biologically triggered behaviours and argued that language conforms to the criteria used in order to define such behavior.
•  Aitchison presents Lenneberg’s criteria as a list of six features: The behaviour emerges before it is necessary. They start talking when they don’t need it for survival. 2. Its appearance is not a result of a conscious decision. 3. Its emergence is not triggered by external events. 4. Direct teaching and intensive practice have relatively little effect. 5. There is a regular sequence of ‘milestones’ as the behavior develops; these can usually be correlated with age and other aspects of development. 6. There may be ‘critical period’ for the acquisition of the behaviour.
•  Human beings have to be exposed to language before puberty in order for language to develop.
•  First language learner’s initial state is supposed to consist of a set of principles and languages vary in limited ways.
•  It means that language learning is highly constrained in advance.
•  UG is the principle of structure-dependency which states that language critically depends on the structural relationship between elements in a sentence.
•  All languages are made up of sentences which consist of at least a NounPhrase and a Verb- Phrase.
•  Universal Grammar includes a universal inventory of categories that the child selects from on the basis of the input.
•  According to White, there are three potential sources of crosslinguistic variation relating to functional categories: Languages can differ in terms of functional categories which are realized in the grammar (like Japanese lacks the category Determiner). 2. The features of a particular functional category can vary from language to language (i.e. French has a gender feature while English does not). 3. Features vary in strength: a feature can be strong in one language and weak in another, with a range of syntactic consequences. (Inflection features are strong in French and weak in English, resulting in certain word-order alterations).
•  Universal Grammar is a theory of natural languages that definitely includes second language too.
•  First and second language learning is similar in many ways.
•  In first language acquisition, explanation that generated most enthusiasm was about some kind of language blueprint in brain.
•  Second language learners go through fairly rigid stages which are unlike both their first language and the second language they are exposed to.
•  The situation is complicated by a number of factors, such as: o SL learners are cognitively mature. They already know at least one other language. They have different motivations for learning a second language.
•  These points have important implications that need to be addressed.
•  Even if, UG hypothesis is correct for first language learning, there are still some logical possibilities concerning its role in SLL. Second languages are not constrained by UG principles and parameters, and they do not behave like natural languages. 2. They are UG constrained. There are different hypotheses regarding whether SL learner has full access or partial access to UG.
•  Learners might not be able to reset parameters; therefore, they operate with first language settings for some parts of the new language.
•  UG theory aims to describe and explain human language.
•  It is nonetheless directly relevant to the study of SL.
•  It is a linguistic theory, not a learning theory
•  It has been hugely influential in drawing up sophisticated hypotheses regarding SLA.
•  It helps exploring interplay between the first and second language learners and facilitates understanding of linguistic knowledge learners bring to the task of SLA
•  It is primarily concerned with the description and explanation of formal system underlying language
•  Its scope does not include a theory of processing or learning.
•  UG is more of a property theory and not a transition theory.
•  Therefore, it must be evaluated as such.

12. Evaluation of Universal Grammar and Cognitive Approaches

•  The Universal Grammar (UG) view of language has been very influential since 1950s, but not uncontroversial.
•  UG approach views language as a mental framework, underlying all human languages. It focuses on some aspects of language and not others.
•  It is only concerned with the sentence and its internal structure rather than any larger unit of language.
•  It studies languages clinically, in a vacuum, as a mental object, rather than a social or psychological one.
•  It separates language knowledge and language use rigidly. Its methodologies are criticized for not being representative of reality.
•  It is preoccupied with the modelling of linguistic competence, not concerned with naturalistic performance.
•  UG theorists are criticized for lacking in reliability of SL judgments. Therefore, their recent work has used range of elicitation techniques.
•  Furthermore, it has left untouched many central areas to our understanding of SLA process.
•  It is exclusively concerned with documenting and explaining nature of SL linguistic system and ignores the social and psychological variables.
•  UG has been very useful for linguistic analysis. It facilitates well-defined and focused hypotheses; it is useful in not only establishing some facts about SLA, but also in explaining those facts.
•  UG approach is only interested in the learner as the processor of a mind that contains language; variations among different individuals are of little concern.
•  Its primary emphasis is on language as the object of study and on what is universal within mind. It makes clear and explicit statements of the ground it aims to cover and the claims it makes.
•  It has systematic procedures for theory evaluation and explains as well as describes at least some language phenomena. It increasingly engages with other theories in the field.
•  The Second Language Acquisition (SLA) researcher under these approaches put more emphasis on the learning component of SLL; they are interested in transition theories.
•  Their focus is still very much on the learner as an individual.
•  They are more interested in understanding how the human brain processes and learns new information.
•  The two approaches of Cognitive theorists of SLA are: