The Competition Model

Eva M. FernándezQueens College & Graduate

CenterCity University of New York

Historical backdrop

Questions about how two languages coexistpinned against questions about how a second language is acquired

Pre-Chomskyan era:Language = speechLanguage is a set of habits, learned by exposure and practiceOperant conditioning: rewards and punishments

And practice eradicates bad habits (e.g., of L1)

Historical backdrop

L1 acquisition research:Developmental stages common to all children

Developmental errors, even when ungrammatical forms don’t occur in the environment

L2 acquisition research:Learner errors are highly suggestive of internal development:Errors resemble those made by childrenErrors aren’t always traceable to L1

Historical backdrop

Intellectual motivation: Chomsky (and others):Language is not habit formation: it’s implicit, mental, and biological

Proof:Competence ~ performanceCompetence (grammar) very similar across languages, hugely complex, vastly under-represented in the stimulus

Plato’s problem: solved by the proposal that most of what you know about language is innate

Historical backdrop

Chomskyan research program: study competence via the idealized speaker/hearer, whose competence developed: Instantly In a purely homogeneous speech community

Without memory/performance limitations

Huh?!

Historical backdrop

Interlanguage, and attention returns to transfer:During acquisitionAt the steady stateAt different levels of analysis:phonology, syntax, semantics, lexicon

Competition Model is one model set up to account for transfer effects, more sophisticated than most, because transfer isn’t unidirectional, L1 L2

Competition Model (CM)

Kathryn Bates, Brian MacWhinney1970s, 1980s-ff.

Cues compete, and the processor weighs them, to arrive at the interpretation of sentences

Cross-linguistic differences in how cues are weighed by speakers of different languages

Such differences bear on the way bilinguals process their two languages

CM: Data Collection

Off-line decisions are optimal reflections of the structure of the language (MacWhinney, 2005, p. 12)

Measuring strength of cues to the selection of an agent, using a sentence interpretation procedure

The canaries squashes the elephant.

CM: Cues

Word order Subject-verb agreement Object-verb agreement Case-marking Contrastive stress Topicalization Animacy Omission (say, of pronouns)

Pronominalization

Designs cross two or more cues, e.g.:

word order &subject-verb agreement

CM: Designs

What’s stronger in Lx, word order (WO) or subject-verb agreement (SVA)?

Target interpretation (driven by plausibility)is supported () or not () by a given cue

WO SVA

The elephant squashes the canaries.

The canaries squashes the elephant.

The elephant squash the canaries.

The canaries squash the elephant.

CM: Cue weight studies

If Lx and Ly have different cue weights(e.g., Spanish relies on SVA, English on WO)what does a Spanish/English bilingual do,in Spanish and English interpretation tasks?Four possibilities:

Forward transfer (L1 L2)Backward transfer (L2 L1)Differentiation (L1 L2)Amalgamation (~L1, ~L2)

CM data: Steady-state bilinguals Kilborn, 1987, 1989:

German-English bilinguals Audio stimuli, German & English (separate sessions) Outcome: forward transfer, L1 L2

Vaid & Pandit, 1991: Hindi-English bilinguals, Hindi at home, English at

school Outcome: highly variable!

7: forward transfer 19: partial forward transfer 17: amalgam in both 5: differentiation

CM data: Interlanguages in flux McDonald, 1987, 1989 (see Figs. 2-3, MacWhinney):Late English-French billinguals, 1st-4th semesterClear forward transfer throughout, but by 4th semester, strategies look like for adult bilinguals

Liu et al., 1992:Chinese-English, English-Chinese, L2 acquired early or late

Late acquirers: forward transferEarly acquirers (L2: 6-10): differentiationVery early acquirers (L2: <4): backward transfer

Generalization…

“ …bilinguals do not function with two independent language systems. Rather, there is a considerable amount of interaction between the two systems in the form of transfer (forward and backward) as well as, in some cases, an amalgamation of strategies. ”

Hernández et al., in press

MacWhinney’s Unified Model Beyond cue competition concepts that are core in CM, the Unified Model is meant to account for:Language acquisitionChildhood multilingualismSecond language acquisitionAdult monolingualism

Is it meant to be a TOE*?

* TOE = Theory of Everything

Cues and competition

PRODUCTION:Cues (forms) compete to express functions

PERCEPTION:Functions compete based on cues from surface forms

The outcome of such competition is determined by the relative strength of cues

Akin to Optimality Theory?

Other models of L2 acquisition An internal (mental) grammar (Chomskyan tradition):Does it develop like L1? Is it subject to transfer effects?Do the two codes mix?Can L1 attrite? If so, how/when/why?

Input drives acquisition, by triggering internal reorganization, controlled by:Universal Grammar (competence) Acquisition strategies (performance)Working memory limitations (g’ral. cognitive arch.)

Unified Model

Differs somewhat from more mainstream models of L2 acquisition…No mention of role of Universal GrammarFocus on acquisition (learning?) strategies not specific to language: analogies, learning from item-based constructions

Incorporates notions ofChunkingTransfer (codes)Resonance

Chunking

Unanalyzed wholes: “chunks”

Definitely play a role in acquisition: L1 & L2“I gotta go” uttered by child“Não falo português” uttered by adult

Can improve developing fluencye.g., linking chunks:“muy” + “buenos días” = “muy buenos días”

Transfer

“Whatever can transfer, will”

Early term: interference Nowadays:

Positive transfer: pro-drop in Spanish & Portuguese

Negative transfer: pro-drop in Spanish & not French

Transfer of training: too many present perfects because of overdrilling; sparragus (hypercorrection)

Errors of avoidance

Transfer: Audition

In bilingual acquisition, Lx and Ly prosodies are recognized as different early on

Until 18 months, infants have superb phoneme recognition abilities; by 18 months, their phonemic repertoire is locked (Janet Werker and colleagues)

Comprehension in very young children is massively sophisticated, even before a productive vocabulary has developed

Early stages of L2 acquisition: listening routines, with L1 bias

Transfer: Articulation

Much harder than audition! Involves multiple musclesEmerged late in evolutionary timelineYet by age 5, most L1 acquirers have it

For L2 (children and adults)Early on, massive transfer of L1 patterns, leading to short-term gains, but long-term liabilities

Age effects: Neuronal flexibility? Input? Affect?

Training and rehearsal could help

Transfer: Lexical learning In L2 acquisition, early on, massive transfer of conceptual structures from L1:“chair” is just another way of saying “silla”

Lots of lexical transfer is positive and therefore goes unnoticed

Negative transfer can sometimes be suppressed: can it?

Errors minimized when two L1 words map onto one, not so when one L1 word maps onto two in L2

Transfer: Sentence comprehension Evidence discussed earlier:

Studies of steady-state bilingualsStudies of language acquirers

“…learning sentence processing cues in a second language is a gradual process … [that] begins with L2 cue weight settings that are close to those for L1. Over time, these settings change in the direction of the native speakers’ settings for L2” (p. 23)

Transfer: Pragmatics

Greetings, leave-takings, promises, turn-taking, honorifics, terms of endearment…Mostly very language-specific

Cooperative principle: language universal?

Not much research on L2 pragmatics! (Brazilians acquirers of English: Fernando Naditch, recent NYU dissertation)

Transfer: Morphology

Transfer close to impossible?L1 Chinese can’t use knowledge about classifiers to learn, say, Spanish as L2

L1ers of languages without determiners (Chinese, Russian) have a hard time learning determiners in L2

If a morphological feature is structurally mapable from L1 to L2, perhaps “my computer, she’s very slow” “die Mond” (<“la luna”)

Resonance

Covert inner speech, used to:process new input relate new forms to other forms

“… repeated coactivation of reciprocal connections. As the set of resonant connections grows, the possibilities for cross-associations and mutual activations grow and the language starts to form a coherent co-activating neural circuit” (p. 31)

Resonance

Might account for delays in behavioral measures:Lx, if more frequently used internally than Ly, is in a higher state of activation than Ly(recall Frenck-Mestre & Pynte’s quantitative differences in eye movements between L1 and L2)

Might account for intuition that “practice makes perfect”: strategic resonance facilitates encoding new forms

Age effects

“… repeated use of L1 leads to its ongoing entrenchment… [which] operates differentially across linguistic areas, with the strongest entrenchement occurring in output phonology and the least entrenchment in the area of lexicon, where new learning continues to occur in L1 in any case” (p. 37)

Learning is highly strategic, therefore high variability in L2A… but why not also in L1A?