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The main purpose of theories of second-language acquisition (SLA) is to shed light on how people who already know one language learn a second language. The field of second-language acquisition involves various contributions, such as linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and education. These multiple fields ...
According to the behaviourist theories prevailing at the time, language learning was a question of habit formation, and this could be reinforced or impeded by existing habits. Therefore, the difficulty in mastering certain structures in a second language (L2) depended on the difference between the learners' mother language (L1) and the language ...
The reason for the popularity of Tannen's book You Just Don't Understand, and the resultant popularization of the difference model, [8] [9] is generally attributed to the style of Tannen's work, in which she adopts a neutral position on differences in genderlect by making no value-judgements about use of language by either gender. Talbot ...
To separate the academic discipline from the learning process itself, the terms second-language acquisition research, second-language studies, and second-language acquisition studies are also used. SLA research began as an interdisciplinary field; because of this, it is difficult to identify a precise starting date. [ 5 ]
Individual variation in second-language acquisition is the study of why some people learn a second language better than others. Unlike children who acquire a language, adults learning a second language rarely reach the same level of competence as native speakers of that language. Some may stop studying a language before they have fully ...
Statistical learning theory suggests that, when learning language, a learner would use the natural statistical properties of language to deduce its structure, including sound patterns, words, and the beginnings of grammar. [46] That is, language learners are sensitive to how often syllable combinations or words occur in relation to other syllables.
Statistical language acquisition, a branch of developmental psycholinguistics, studies the process by which humans develop the ability to perceive, produce, comprehend, and communicate with natural language in all of its aspects (phonological, syntactic, lexical, morphological, semantic) through the use of general learning mechanisms operating on statistical patterns in the linguistic input.
One theory of language acquisition is the comprehensible output hypothesis. Developed by Merrill Swain, the comprehensible output (CO) hypothesis states that learning takes place when learners encounter a gap in their linguistic knowledge of the second language (L2).