WHAT IS THE LOGICAL PROBLEM OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING? Robert Bley-Vroman The fundamental difference hypothesis

The fundamental difference hypothesis WHAT IS THE LOGICAL PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION? “A consideration of the character of the grammar that is acquired, the degenerate quality and narrowly limited extent of the available data, the striking uniformity of the resulting grammars, and their independence of intelligence, motivation and emotional state, over wide ranges of variation, leave little hope that much of the structure of language can be learned by an organism initially uninformed as to its general character.” (Chomsky 1965: 58) Have you hear about “the logical problem of language acquisition”? What does it refer to? If you read the quote by Chomsky, what is the the logical problem? “The gap between available experience and attained competence” forms the logical problem. The question is how can we have such rich, complex and varied capacity that goes beyond what we can derive from experience. “The problem demanding explanation is compounded by other factors: despite variation in backgournd and intelligence, people´s mature linguistic capacity emerges in a fairly uniform fashion, in just a few years, without much apparent effort, conscious thought, r difficulty; and it develops with only a narrow range of the logically possible “errors”” (Lightfoot, 1984: 20) “The question is how children acquire so much more than they experience” p21 “Normal children attain a fairly rich system of linguistic knowledge by five or six years of age and a mature system by puberty; this is impressive when compared with the labourious efforts of squads of adult linguists who educated and trained up to the eyeballs, try with only moderate success to characterize explicitly what people know when they know Dutch, Hopi, or whatever” p21 The fundamental difference hypothesis

The fundamental difference hypothesis In other words, the question is how children acquire so much more than they experience Universal grammar The fundamental difference hypothesis

What is Universal Grammar (UG)? “A system of knowledge of what a human language can be and innate domain-specific procedures for arriving at a grammar” (Bley-Vroman, 1989: 41) The fundamental difference hypothesis

The fundamental difference hypothesis How do child language acquisition and foreign language learning differ? Adults differ in… their degree of success the character and uniformity of the resulting systems its susceptibility to factors (motivation, etc) Previous state of the organism The fundamental difference hypothesis

The fundamental difference hypothesis WHAT IS THE LOGICAL PROBLEM OF ADULT FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING? Have you hear about “the logical problem of language acquisition”? What does it refer to? If you read the quote by Chomsky, what is the the logical problem? “The gap between available experience and attained competence” forms the logical problem. The question is how can we have such rich, complex and varied capacity that goes beyond what we can derive from experience. “The problem demanding explanation is compounded by other factors: despite variation in backgournd and intelligence, people´s mature linguistic capacity emerges in a fairly uniform fashion, in just a few years, without much apparent effort, conscious thought, r difficulty; and it develops with only a narrow range of the logically possible “errors”” (Lightfoot, 1984: 20) “The question is how children acquire so much more than they experience” p21 “Normal children attain a fairly rich system of linguistic knowledge by five or six years of age and a mature system by puberty; this is impressive when compared with the labourious efforts of squads of adult linguists who educated and trained up to the eyeballs, try with only moderate success to characterize explicitly what people know when they know Dutch, Hopi, or whatever” p21 The fundamental difference hypothesis

The fundamental difference hypothesis To explain why some learners are more successful than others. What accounts for this possible but unlikely success? “…explaining the quite high level of competence that is clearly possible in some cases, while permitting the wide range of variation that is also observed” (page 50) The fundamental difference hypothesis

The fundamental difference hypothesis “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).” Bley-Vroman, p 41) The fundamental difference hypothesis

How do we explain then adult foreign language learning? Problem-solving principles + first language knowledge The fundamental difference hypothesis

THE FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE HYPOTHESIS Child language development Adult foreign language learning UG Domain-specific Learning procedures First- language knowledge = GENERAL ADULT SKILL ACQUISITION Problem-solving principles The fundamental difference hypothesis

The fundamental difference hypothesis Why are some learners more successful than others? “Cognitive models of general problem solving involve setting goals. Its is expected that different people will view the problem to be solved in different ways and will set different goals in a given domain” (page 46) The fundamental difference hypothesis

The fundamental difference hypothesis Why are some learners more successful than others? “ “the native language must be sifted: that which is likely to be universal must be separated from which is an accidental property of the native language. Differnt learners may be expected to approach this task differently…” (page 52) “.. It also on the individual learner´s ability to construct a UG-surrogate, one can expect some partial success…and some considerable individual variation.” (page 53) The fundamental difference hypothesis