Manfred Pienemann

On determining developmental stages in natural second language acquisition

Research on Second Language (L2) Acquisition, over the past ten years, has undergone substantial changes by shifting its focus of interest away from an analysis of linguistic structures alone, concentrating more on the learner himself or, rather, on the process of learning. It had become obvious that one of the major shortcomings in contrastive studies as well as in the usual kind of error analysis is that they lack thorough investigation of factors which determine the kind of approach a learner may take to acquire a second language. This again implies that it is more fruitful to study the process of learning itself instead of merely analysing its outputs. It is by now widely accepted that the learner takes an active part in the learning process and does not merely get trapped in structural gaps which linguists may find when comparing the source language (the learners L1) and the target language (L2).

Psychological Constraints on the Teachability of Languages.

This paper reports on the influence of formal instruction on L2 acquisition in an instructional experiment with child learners. The main tendency of the findings is that a structure can only be learned under instruction if the learners interlanguage has already reached a stage one step prior to the acquisition of the structure to be taught. My hypothesis for an explanation suggests that the teachability of L2 structures is constrained by the same processing restrictions that determine the developmental sequences of natural L2 acquisition: since the processing procedures of each stage build upon the procedures of the preceding stage there is no way to leave out a stage of the developmental sequence by the means of formal teaching. Following such a processing capacity approach I reject the assumption that the constraints on teachability can be explained on the basis of linguistic input.

Transfer and typological proximity in the context of second language processing

In this article, the issue of cross-linguistic influence in second language acquisition is examined from a processing perspective. Applying Processability Theory as the theoretical framework we claim that second language (L2) learners can only produce forms they are able to process. We thus argue that the first language (L1) influence on the L2 is developmentally moderated. Data were collected from German L2 learners with Swedish as their L1. Twenty informants participated in the study, 10 in their first year of German (13 years of age) and 10 in their second year of German (14 years of age). Both languages involved are typologically very close but not mutually intelligible. The results show that Swedish learners of German do not transfer the verb-second structure from their L1 to the L2 even though this structure is identical in both languages.Instead they start out with canonical word order and subsequently produce an intermediate structure (adv NPsubj V X), which is ungrammatical in the L1 and the L2. These observations support the idea of a developmentally moderated transfer. The results clearly contradict the predictions from the ‘full transfer/full access’ hypothesis (Schwartz and Sprouse, 1994; 1996).

A unified approach towards the development of Swedish as L2: a processability account

This paper has two main objectives: (a) to put the vast body of research on Swedish as a second language (SSL) into one coherent framework; and (b) to test the predictions deriving from processability theory (Pienemann, 1998a, 1998b) for Swedish against this empirical database. We will survey the 14 most prominent research projects on SSL covering wide areas of syntax and morphology in longitudinal and cross-sectional studies. This survey is the first to be carried out for Swedish, and it will bring the body of two decades of research into one unified framework. We proceed in the following steps: First, a brief summary of processability theory is given. Then the theory is used to generate a unifying framework for the development of the specific L2 grammatical system (Swedish). Finally, the new framework is tested in the above-mentioned empirical studies. (Less)

Developmental dynamics in L1 and L2 acquisition: Processability Theory and generative entrenchment

This paper has two major objectives: (1) to summarise Processability Theory, a processing-oriented approach to explaining language development and (2) to utilise this theory in the comparison of development in LI and L2 acquisition. Proponents of the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (between L1 and L2) assume that L1 development can be explained with reference to Universal Grammar (UG) which, in their view, is inaccessible to L2 learners. Instead, they claim that a second language develops on the basis of language processing strategies. I will show that the fundamentally different developmental paths inherent in first and second language acquisition can both be explained on the basis of the same language processing mechanics (as specified in Processability Theory). I will demonstrate that the developmental differences between L1 and L2 are caused by the qualitatively different early structural hypotheses which propagate through the acquisition process. The concept of “propagation of structural features” will be viewed as “generative entrenchment,” a logical-mathematical concept, which has proved to be highly productive in examining other kinds of developmental processes.

COALA-A computational system for interlanguage analysis:

This article describes a computational system for the linguistic analysis of language acquisition data (COALA). The system is a combined AI and database tool which allows the user to form highly complex queries about morphosyntactic and semantic structures contained in large sets of data. COALA identifies those sentences that meet the linguistic criteria defined by the user. It allows the user to freely define such linguistic contexts and to step through the sentences identified by the system. COALA then rapidly displays those sentences in their original discourse context. Additionally, COALA can perform statistical analyses in response to structural linguistic queries. This article contains (1) a discussion of the computational approach taken in the design of COALA, (2) a description of the functionality of the system, and (3) a reflection on the validity of the analytical categories contained therein.

Response Article. Full Transfer vs. Developmentally Moderated Transfer: A Reply to Bohnacker.

Ute Bohnackers (2006) article on the acquisition of the verb second (V2) property in German by native speakers of Swedish (also a V2 language) is an attempted rebuttal of Håkansson et al.s (2002) work on first language (L1) transfer and aspects of the underlying theory on which the work is based: Processability Theory (Pienemann, 1998). The article by Håkansson et al. presented empirical evidence from a similar population of learners (native language Swedish, target language German), showing that V2 is not transferred at the initial state. Unfortunately, Bohnacker misrepresents key aspects of our work on L1 transfer and, paradoxically, her own data constitute empirical evidence supporting our position, as we show in this response.

Comparing levels of processability across languages

In this article we utilize a developmental perspective as a metric for the comparison of bilingual language ability. In particular, we utilize Processabilty Theory (Pienemann, 1998a, 2005) which provides a psycholinguistic metric for developmental schedules of any given language. We demonstrate this approach to the cross-linguistic measurement of language development on the basis of Itani-Adams’ (2007) study of bilingual (Japanese—English) first language acquisition.

Variation and dynamic systems in SLA

In their paper De Bot, Lowie and Verspoor (henceforth DBL&V) attempt to recast SLA research from a non-modular and psychometric position that is based on the assumption that “all variables are interrelated and therefore changes in one variable will have an impact on all other variables that are part of the system” (p. 8). In such grand endeavour their paper naturally raises a large number of issues in SLA research.

A Cognitive View of Language Acquisition: Processability Theory and Beyond

The purpose of this chapter is to give an overview of one cognitive view of language acquisition, Processability Theory (PT), which focuses on the development of grammar in L2 learners. The key assumption is that the development of L2 grammar is constrained by the language processor and that L2 grammatical development can be explained by the architecture of the language processor.