Journal of the European Second Language Association (Aug 2022)
Second language learning of morphology
Abstract
Second language (L2) speakers have especial difficulty learning and processing morphosyntax. I present a usage-based analysis of this phenomenon. Usage-based approaches to language learning hold that we learn constructions (form-function mappings, conventionalized in a speech community) from language usage by means of general cognitive mechanisms (exemplar-based, rational, associative learning). An individual’s language system emerges from the conspiracy of these associations. I take the broad theoretical framework of language as a complex adaptive system and then focus in upon several subcomponents of the ecology including: cognitive linguistics and construction grammar; the psychology of implicit and explicit learning; effects of contingency and salience upon associative learning; the linguistic cycle: Zipf’s law, shortening, and grammaticalization; the low learnability of morphology that results from language change; learned attention, blocking, and transfer; form-focused dialogic feedback or instruction in second language acquisition (L2A); the types and tokens of exemplars that lead the learning of particular morphemes from usage and the distributional effects of frequency, reliability, and formulaic contexts. In terms of fundamental principles of associative learning: Low salience, low contingency, and redundancy all lead to morphological form-function mappings being less well learned. Compounding this, adult L2 acquirers show effects of learned attention and blocking as a result of L1-tuned automatized processing of language. I review a series of experimental studies of learned attention and blocking in L2A. I describe educational interventions targeted upon these phenomena. Form-focused instruction recruits learners’ explicit, conscious processing capacities and allows them to notice novel L2 constructions. Once a construction has been represented as a form-function mapping, its use in subsequent implicit processing can update the statistical tallying of its frequency of usage and probabilities of form-function mapping, consolidating it into the system.
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