Introduction to Psycholinguistics
Senior 6 · Psychology (Languages)
Introduction to Psycholinguistics
Lesson 4 of 4
25 min
From 1965, schools near Montreal in Canada began teaching English-speaking children in French from their first school year, an approach called French immersion. By the end of primary school these children understood spoken and written French almost as well as native speakers of the same age. Yet when the Canadian linguist Merrill Swain studied immersion pupils in the 1980s, she found that their spoken and written French still contained many grammar errors that native-speaking children did not make.
The pupils had heard years of understandable French, but they had rarely been pushed to produce it accurately: teachers did most of the talking. Swain concluded that understanding a language is not enough; learners also need to speak and write it, notice their gaps and correct them. Her conclusion is one of several theories of how a second language is acquired.
Definition
Second language (L2) acquisition (SLA): the process of learning a language after the first language (or languages) is established, whether in school or by living where it is spoken.
Interlanguage: the learner’s developing version of the new language, with its own rules that are neither the first language nor the target language (Larry Selinker, 1972).
Fossilisation: when some errors in a learner’s interlanguage stop changing despite continued exposure.
Language transfer: the influence of the first language on the second. Positive transfer helps (similar words or rules); negative transfer (interference) causes errors.
Comprehensible input: language a learner can understand, ideally a little beyond their current level.
| Feature | First language | Second language |
|---|---|---|
| Age | From birth | Any age, often in school or adulthood |
| Prior language | None | The first language can help or interfere |
| Amount of input | Thousands of hours, in daily life | Often a few hours a week in class |
| Motivation and anxiety | Natural need to communicate; little anxiety | Varies greatly; anxiety can block use (Unit 2) |
| Final outcome | Full command | Varies widely; native-like accent and grammar are rarer after childhood |
Krashen’s monitor model. Stephen Krashen (1982) proposed five hypotheses:
Figure 1. Krashen’s affective filter hypothesis.
Critics argued that the difference between “acquisition” and “learning” cannot be tested, and that input alone is not enough, as Swain’s immersion pupils showed. Two other theories add to Krashen:
| Type | Example for Rwandan learners |
|---|---|
| Positive transfer | English and French share thousands of related words (nation, important, information), so a learner of one has a head start in the other. |
| Negative transfer (sounds) | Kinyarwanda does not use the sounds r and l to tell words apart, so some learners at first find English pairs such as rice and lice hard to hear and say. |
| False friends | French actuellement means “currently”, not “actually”; librairie means “bookshop”, not “library”. |
| Field | Application |
|---|---|
| Language teaching | Communicative and task-based teaching; balancing input, output and interaction; lowering anxiety. |
| Reading and literacy | Teaching the link between sounds and letters; identifying and supporting dyslexia. |
| Speech and language therapy | Helping people with aphasia after a stroke, children with language delay, people who stutter. |
| Technology | Speech recognition, machine translation and AI language models, which need large amounts of text in each language; languages such as Kinyarwanda have far less digital text than English. |
| Law and media | Forensic linguistics (identifying authors of texts); writing clear public-health messages. |
Current research uses brain imaging to see how multilingual people control several languages, large shared recordings of children’s speech in many languages, and comparisons between children and AI language models. A child hears perhaps tens of millions of words before school, while recent AI models are trained on hundreds of billions; how children learn so much from so little remains one of the central questions of the field.
CELT Athens: “Stephen Krashen on Language Acquisition, Part 1 of 2”. Krashen explains his own hypotheses; listen for his definition of comprehensible input, then weigh it against Swain’s immersion findings.
Important
Evaluate the theories. Krashen’s model was very influential in classrooms and fits the observation that learners understand more than they can say, but its central distinction is hard to test and it underplays speaking practice. Swain’s and Long’s hypotheses are supported by classroom studies showing that pushed output and negotiated interaction improve accuracy, though most of those studies are short. No single theory explains all of SLA; age, input, interaction, motivation and anxiety all contribute.
Warning
Common mistake: treating every learner error as carelessness. Many errors are systematic features of interlanguage or transfer, and show that the learner is testing rules, as a child does with “goed”.
Tip
Memory hook for Krashen’s five hypotheses: “All My New Ideas Accumulate”: Acquisition–learning, Monitor, Natural order, Input, Affective filter.
Practice
Further reading
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the text, the tables, Figure 1 and the exercises.
