The Psychology of Second Language Acquisition. Zoltan Dornyei

one of the main intentions of this book to provide the readers with enough background knowledge to be able to make use of this accumulating neuroscientific evidence.

      Interim summary: the permeability of disciplinary boundaries

      We have arrived at a new phase of studying the acquisition and processing of language, and one of the most obvious characteristics of modern times is the increasing fluidity of academic identities and the growing permeability of disciplinary boundaries. Nobody is surprised nowadays to see, for example, a former hardcore generative linguist becoming engaged in developmental psycholinguistic research (perhaps also doing some neuroimaging on the side), and it does not seem strange at all that a scholar might align him/herself simultaneously with applied, cognitive, and psycholinguistics. There is an increasing amount of common ground in the various subdisciplines, making it possible to straddle the borders between them or to completely cross the boundaries, dipping in and out. Thus, it seems to me that the main academic organizational force at present is not so much the inherent content of the various disciplines and strands as the individual scholars’ subjective affiliation to professional organizations and conferences as their main reference points.

      Interestingly, the academic community is behaving very much like a complex system would, with new directions and groupings emerging as a result of the field’s self-organizing capacity. A classic example of this emergent feature is the appearance of ‘bilingualism’ as an academic rubric: strictly speaking it is not an academic discipline (and, accordingly, I will discuss it in more detail later under the various types of language attainment) and yet it has now its own journals and well-attended international conventions – in fact, an increasing number of scholars who used to call themselves applied linguists, psycholinguists, or SLA researchers now fly the bilingualism banner. It would be an intriguing study to apply dynamic systems theory (See Ch. 3) to the analysis of the evolution and sociology of SLA research. In any case, the main lesson for our current purpose is that we need not worry too much about the exact labelling of research directions. My personal feeling is that we are all inevitably becoming, at least partially, cognitive neuroscientists specializing in second language issues.

      Main avenues to language attainment

      The term ‘language acquisition’ often occurs in the language-related psychological literature without any specification as to whether the authors are talking about the acquisition of an L1 or an L2, let alone specifying the exact type of these broad categories. Looking more closely at these texts we will usually find that ‘language acquisition’ refers to mother-tongue attainment only, with relatively few language psychologists addressing the unique issues of L2 acquisition and processing. Although in their influential text on psycholinguistics, Berko Gleason and Bernstein Ratner (1998: p. v) state that a ‘psycholinguistic discussion of language processing would not be complete without consideration of bilingualism and second language learning’, this is not (as yet) the standard position in psychology.

      It has been pointed out by many that the majority of the people living in the world speak more than one language and therefore the norm is not monolingualism but bilingualism. So why is there such an obvious reluctance in psychologists to consider second language issues? And how much can we generalize findings from L1 acquisition studies to SLA? What are the similarities and differences between the two processes? Are there situations (e.g. early learning) when SLA can be seen as virtually identical to L1 acquisition? Can we distinguish two types of SLA depending on whether the L2 is primarily acquired in the host environment or in a formal school setting? And more generally, what are the main types of bilingualism and how do they differ in psychological terms? These are some of the central questions that will be addressed in our exploration of the psychological basis of SLA in the following chapters. Let us have a preliminary overview of the main issues here.

      First language acquisition

      Infants learn language with remarkable speed, but how they do it remains a mystery.

(Kuhl 2004: 831)

      Although in theory the study of L1 acquisition falls outside the SLA focus of this book, the following chapters will contain a surprisingly large amount of material that is derived from the study of mother-tongue learning. This is because the comparison between L1 and L2 acquisition is enlightening both when we find similarities and when the two processes display deviating features. Accordingly, the process of how infants master their first language will be a recurring theme throughout this book and therefore I would like to address four general issues here concerning L1 acquisition and its research: (1) mysterious uniformity; (2) nature versus nurture; (3) the evolution of language acquisition research; and (4) early milestones in L1 development.

      Mysterious uniformity of L1 acquisition

      One of the most common statements about L1 acquisition in the literature concerns the remarkable uniformity of the process. Indeed, there seems to be a general agreement amongst scholars that children acquire an impressive amount of language in a comparatively short time without much direct tuition and with remarkable commonality (Shatz 2007). This uniformity is quite mysterious in at least two ways: first, after decades of intensive research, we still do not know enough about the details of the acquisition process or why there is such little variability in its ultimate outcome. Berko Gleason (2005: 5), for example, concludes that ‘explaining what it is that children acquire during the course of language development is easier than explaining how they do it’, and N. Ellis (2005b: 3) adds that ‘never has there been so much debate as there currently is concerning the mechanisms of first language acquisition’.

      The second source of puzzlement concerns the fact that although there is a general emphasis in the literature on the uniformity of the L1 acquisition process, a closer look reveals a great deal of individual-level variation in how native speakers acquire and use their L1. We tend to talk about ‘native-like proficiency’ in a language, but the content of this term is rather difficult to define scientifically beyond Doughty’s (2003: 258) specification that children learning their L1 are ‘eventually indistinguishable from other native speakers of their speech community’. Yet, within the L1 speech community there appears to be a considerable diversity across L1 speakers’ command of their mother tongue, from their pronunciation to their syntactic or pragmatic skills. A detailed analysis of the variability in L1 acquisition goes beyond the scope of this book, although some aspects of it will be addressed in Chs. 5 and 6; let me conclude here with a thought-provoking comment by Bohannon and Bonvillian (2005: 273):