Second language acquisition / Roumyana Slabakova.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Slabakova, Roumyana.

Series:

Oxford core linguistics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Second language acquisition.

Physical Description:

xxi, 483 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2016.

Summary:

This textbook approaches second language acquisition from the perspective of generative, linguistics. Roumyana Slabakova reviews and discusses paradigms and findings from the last thirty years of research in the field, focussing in particular on how the second or additional language is represented in the mind and how it is used in communication. The adoption and analysis of a specific model of acquisition, the Bottleneck Hypothesis, provides a unifying perspective. The book assumes some non-technical knowledge of linguistics, but important concepts are clearly introduced and defined throughout, making it a valuable resource not only for undergraduate and graduate students of linguistics, but also for researchers in cognitive science and language teachers. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part I Language

1 Language architecture 3

1.1 What is language? What is knowledge of language? 3

1.2 The language architecture 10

1.3 What exactly has to be acquired? 16

1.4 The scientific method in SLA research 18

1.5 Exercises 21

2 Language variation 24

2.1 How do languages differ? 24

2.2 Principles and Parameters in history 29

2.3 The Minimalist Program 38

2.4 What is the learning task for bilinguals? 44

2.5 Exercises 47

3 The psychological reality of language in use 52

3.1 What happens when we hear a sentence? 53

3.2 Phonological perception and lexical recognition 53

3.3 Morphology 57

3.4 The syntactic parser 60

3.5 Models of syntactic processing 66

3.6 Working memory 72

3.7 The psychological reality of language and the grammar 75

3.8 Exercises 76

Part II Language Acquisition

4 The Critical Period Hypothesis 83

4.1 The view from biology 83

4.2 The two positions in second language acquisition 85

4.3 Global nativelikeness versus different sensitive periods for the separate parts of the grammar 86

4.4 The first and the second language as communicating vessels 90

4.5 Effects of bilingualism: Is the bilingual two monolinguals in one mind? 92

4.6 The importance of the input 95

4.7 An indirect way of appreciating the importance of input 99

4.8 Conclusions 102

4.9 Exercises 104

5 First language acquisition, two first languages 110

5.1 Acquisition of the sounds of one's native language 110

5.2 Learning word meanings 115

5.3 Acquisition of functional morphology and syntax 119

5.4 Acquisition of semantics and pragmatics 130

5.5 Bilingual first language acquisition 132

5.6 Exercises 136

6 Child second language, multilingual and heritage language acquisition, language attrition 141

6.1 Adult L2 acquisition 142

6.2 Child L2 acquisition 142

6.3 L3/Ln acquisition 147

6.4 Heritage language learners 153

6.5 Language attrition 158

6.6 Commonalities and differences between the four acquisition contexts 161

6.6.1 Is age the crucial factor in bilingual acquisition? 161

6.6.2 The Critical Period Hypothesis and the importance of the input 162

6.6.3 What kind of input? 163

6.6.4 Which areas of the grammar suffer with reduced input? 163

6.6.5 Are first and second language acquisition qualitatively different? 164

6.7 Exercises 168

Part III Second Language Acquisition

7 Acquisition of (functional) morphology 175

7.1 Morpheme studies 176

7.2 Syntax-before-morphology, White (2003) 182

7.3 Representational Deficit Hypotheses 186

7.4 The Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis 189

7.5 The Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis 194

7.6 The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis 197

7.7 Exercises 203

8 Acquisition of syntax 208

8.1 A historical excursion into the notion of parameter (through the ages) 208

8.2 Representational Deficit versus Full Functional Representation accounts 213

8.3 Word order 215

8.4 Verb movement 221

8.5 Wh-movement 227

8.6 Conclusion 235

8.7 Exercises 236

9 Acquisition of the mental lexicon 245

9.1 Mental representation and access of lexical items 246

9.1.1 Bilingual lexicon representation models 247

9.1.2 The bilingual lexicon is integrated across languages 248

9.1.3 The bilingual lexicon is accessed in a language-independent way 249

9.1.4 Language exposure and use affects the activation of words in the lexicon 250

9.1.5 Language context may not affect bilingual language activation 251

9.2 Inhibition of one language to speak another 252

9.3 Morphological decomposition in the lexicon 255

9.4 Argument structure 258

9.5 Transfer of reference 267

9.6 Conclusion 270

9.7 Exercises 270

10 Acquisition of the syntax-semantics interface 285

10.1 Types of meaning 285

10.2 Mismatches at the syntax-semantics interface 290

10.3 L2 acquisition of syntax-semantics mismatches 292

10.4 Poverty of the Stimulus (earning situations in semantics 299

10.5 Meaning of novel constructions 303

10.6 Conjuring up something from nothing 307

10.7 Conclusions 311

10.8 Exercises 312

11 Acquisition of the syntax-discourse and semantics- pragmatics interfaces 319

11.1 Where is the syntax-discourse interface? 319

11.2 Marking of Topic and Focus across second languages 322

11.3 Word order: constraints and strategies 330

11.4 Pronoun reference 334

11.5 Intonation at the syntax-discourse interface 338

11.6 Scalar implicatures 341

11.7 Conclusion 347

11.8 Exercises 347

12 L2 processing 355

12.1 Experimental techniques employed in bilingual processing studies 356

12.2 Accounts and predictions 362

12.3 L2 processing of functional morphology 363

12.4 Parsing and syntactic processing in the L2 368

12.5 Integration of meaning in syntactic processing 372

12.6 Individual differences in grammar processing 377

12.7 Conclusion 384

12.8 Exercises 385

13 The Bottleneck Hypothesis and its implications for the second language classroom 389

13.1 The Bottleneck Hypothesis again 391

13.1.1 What is special about the inflectional morphology? 391

13.1.2 Lexical access and processing of functional morphology 395

13.1.3 If the inflectional morphology is available, complex syntax is not a barrier to meaning 399

13.1.4 If the inflectional morphology is available, semantics and pragmatics are not a problem 400

13.1.5 Putting it all together 402

13.2 Situating the Bottleneck Hypothesis in L2 learning and teaching 403

13.3 Focus on form, interaction, practice, and input processing in the classroom 407

13.4 How to, and how not to, focus on the functional morphology in the classroom 409

13.5 Final words: what is difficult and what is easy to acquire in a second language 413

13.6 Exercises 415.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 427-473) and index.

ISBN:

0199687269

9780199687268

9780199687275

0199687277

OCLC:

920725146