These activities is not needed to complete the module; if you have completed the earlier activities you are already finished with the module. The information here is a list of suggested discussion topics for the group discussion session. For more details on what this is used for, see "Instructions for leading discussions".
Have the class discuss and brainstorm ways that the psycholinguistic methods and topics from throughout this semester could be used for first language acquisition research. This must go beyond just examining people's proficiency or looking at which things are hard to learn; it should be things that can only be discovered using psycholinguistic techniques and not by just asking people to answer questions or fill out a test form.
Have the class discuss and brainstorm ways that the psycholinguistic methods and topics from throughout this semester could be used for second language acquisition research. This must go beyond just examining people's proficiency or looking at which things are hard to learn; it should be things that can only be discovered using psycholinguistic techniques and not by just asking people to answer questions or fill out a test form.
For example, a student leading this discussion in a previous semester pointed out that there's an SLA theory called "Input Processing Theory" which includes a concept called the "First Noun Principle", which predicts that L2 learners will preferentially interpret the first noun or pronoun in a sentence as being the subject or agent (e.g. Tight, 2012, "The First Noun Principle and ambitransitive verbs"), and asked students to design an experiment testing this using a psycholinguistic method. This is just one example of a discussion topic that could be used for this activity.
Previously, we examined some questions about whether adult language learners process their second language like native speakers do.
Many people who research second language acquisition with psycholinguistics get even more specific. They examine what kinds of features in the second language are easy or difficult to acquire. Let's see some examples of what this means.
Sometimes when you learn a new language it has some feature that already exists in your native language (or other languages that you already know). Sometimes it has a totally new feature that doesn't exist in your native language. And sometimes it has a feature from your native language but uses it in a different way.
I think it's not too hard to come up with examples of totally new features. The more complicated one is features that exist in a new language, but are used differently (or at different times) than they are in your native language. Here are two examples. They are both based on the concept of agreement, so let's first examine what agreement is, and then go on to the examples.
English, Chinese, French, and Spanish all have agreement: sometimes some words have to agree with each other in some way. Consider pronouns. They have to agree in number with the noun they are replacing. If a pronoun refers to a plural noun, it has to be plural; if it refers to a singular noun, it has to be singular. For example, in English, I could say What did the girls do? They took a test. But I can't say What did the girls do? *She took a test.
Chinese works in the same way. For example, if I ask 那些女孩昨天做什么？, the answer should use 她们, not just 她.
There are many languages that use agreement, but some of them use agreement in other ways.
For example, English also has agreement between subjects and verbs, as shown in the table below:
| Singular | Plural | |
| 1st person | I adore | we adore |
| 2nd person | you adore | you adore |
| 3rd person | he/she adores | they adore |
English subject-verb agreement is very limited, but it happens a little bit: with certain kinds of subjects, the verb needs a special suffix. This is not the case in Chinese, where the verb is always the same no matter what the subject is:
| Singular | Plural | |
| 1st person | 我熱愛 | 我们熱愛 |
| 2nd person | 你熱愛 | 你们熱愛 |
| 3rd person | TA熱愛 | TA们熱愛 |
So Chinese and English both have agreement, but it's used in different ways. Both languages have pronoun-antecedent agreement. But while English has subject-verb agreement, Chinese does not.
French and Spanish also have agreement, but also in some similar and some different ways than English and Chinese. Just like English, French also has subject-verb agreement, as you can see from the table below (and French subject-verb agreement is much more extensive than English):
| Singular | Plural | |
| 1st person | j'adore | nous adorons |
| 2nd person | tu adores | vous adorez |
| 3rd person | il/elle/on adore | ils/elles adorent |
But French has agreement in a place that English doesn't have it. In English, there is only one word the. It doesn't matter if the noun after the is singular or plural; the is always the same. Compare: the table, the tables.
In French, however, singular nouns need the singular version of the, and plural nouns need the plural version of the. Compare: la table, les tables.
So, just like English has agreement in a place where Chinese doesn't, French also has agreement in a place where English doesn't: French, but not English, has article-noun agreement.
Some languages also have kinds of agreement that don't occur in other languages. So far we've seen two different kinds of agreement: number agreement (e.g., singular nouns need singular pronouns), as well as person agreement (e.g., a third-person subject needs a third-person suffix on the verb). Other languages have other kinds of agreement as well.
In Spanish (and many other languages), nouns have gender: certain nouns are considered "masculine" and certain are considered "femininine". (For no reason; this is purely a grammatical feature and has nothing to do with social norms of masculinity or femininity.) For example, in French, fenêtre ("window") is feminine but livre ("book") is masculine. Articles (like "a" or "the") have to agree with nouns in terms of gender: "the window" in French is la fenêtre, but "the book" is le livre. You can think of this as being similar to 量词 in Chinese languages: just like different French nouns need special articles to match them, different Chinese nouns need special classifiers to match them ("one book" is 一本书 but "one table" is 一张桌子).
Now, in Spanish, demonstratives (words like "this", "that", "these", "those") have to agree in number with their nouns. This happens in English, too: a singular noun goes with a singular demonstrative (this boy), a plural noun goes with a plural demonstrative (these boys), and they can't mix (*this boys or *these boy are ungrammatical). Same in Spanish. To say "this apartment", we would say este apartamento (este is the singular, meaning "this"), not *estos apartamento (estos is the plural, meaning "these").
But, Spanish (unlike English) also requires gender agreement here. Apartamento (apartment) is a "masculine" noun. So it needs a masculine determiner. Spanish has two words that mean "this": este is the masculine form of "this", and esta is the feminine form of "this". (It's just like the le and la example from French we saw above, where le is the masculine "the" and la is the feminine "the".) So in Spanish we must say este apartamento, not esta apartamento. On the other hand, if we used a feminine noun, we would have to use esta.
This shows that there are two ways a feature can be used differently in different languages. The feature may occur in different places in the language (e.g., English, Chinese, and French all have number agreement; but in Chinese it only happens in noun-pronoun pairings, in English it also happens in subject-verb pairings, and in French it happens on both of those as well as on article-noun pairings). Or the feature can occur in the same place but with different kinds of information (e.g., English and Spanish both have agreement on demonstrative-noun pairs; but in English they only have to agree in terms of number, but in Spanish they also have to agree in terms of both number and gender).
This is only a small sample of places where agreement can happen. There are many others. For example, while we talked about subject-verb agreement, some languages also have object-verb agreement: the verb has to take a special suffix to match the object. And some languages have definiteness agreement: if a noun is definite, all its adjectives also have to be definite (for example, in English we say "the big fat lazy cat", but in Arabic what they'd say is literally "the-big the-fat the-lazy the-cat").
In the field of second language acquisition there are lots of different theories about what kinds of features can or can't be acquired to a native-like level. These include things like the "Full Transfer Full Access Hypothesis", "Interpretability Hypothesis", and lots more (you don't need to learn or understand these theories for this class, I am just naming some examples in case you want to search more; you probably will learn more about these if you take a class in Second Language Acquisition).
The paper below is a good example of a psycholinguistic experiment that aimed to test whether second language learners can fully acquire new features.
In the class discussion session, have students brainstorm examples of a feature that is used two languages (e.g., a feature that's used in both Chinese and English, or a feature that's used in both Japanese and Korean, or whatever), but is used in different ways in the two languages, or is used in different places in the two different languages? Also have them brainstorm how they could use psycholinguistic methods to test how people acquire these features.
by Stephen Politzer-Ahles. Last modified on 2021-07-15. CC-BY-4.0.