Chapter 5
The uncertainty principle in second language acquisition
This chapter presents three themes that I have discussed with Mike Long on different occasions in recent years: The Discontinuity Hypothesis, the necessity to study the ‘intra-language’ (in addition to the ‘interlanguage’) and the uncertainty principle. The latter is the idea that abstract rules and statistical regularities are entangled states of mind in a L2 learner’s competence, to the extent that researchers can never know whether learners are recognizing a morphosyntactic form (due to its frequency) or they are generating that form by a rule (due to abstract ‘labels that predate the input’). Uncertainty implies that what we can uncover about a learner’s implicit competence depends on how such competence is measured.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction: Mike and science
- 2.Rationalism continued
- 3.Second language development could be twofold
- 4.Second language acquisition research could benefit from the study of intra-language
- 5.Language competence could be permanently re-assembled and rehearsed during online performance
- 6.The knowability issue
- 7.The uncertainly principle and second language development
- 8.Arrivederci
-
Notes
-
References
References (30)
References
Ajemian, R., D’Ausilio, A., Moormand, E., & Bizzi, A. (2013). A theory for how sensorimotor skills are learned and retained in noisy and nonstationary neural circuits. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 110(52) E5078–E5087. 

Bizzi, E., & Ajemian, R. (2015). A hard scientific quest: Understanding voluntary movements. Daedalus, 144(1), 83–95. 

Bley-Vroman, R. (2002). Frequency in production, comprehension and acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24(2), 209–213. 

Chater, N., & Christiansen, M. H. (2010). Language acquisition meets language evolution. Cognitive Science, 34(7): 1131–1157. 

Chomsky, N. (1995). The minimalist program. The MIT Press.
Dekydspotter, L. (2009). Second language epistemology. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 31(2), 291–321. 

Ellis, N. (2005). At the interface: Dynamic interactions of explicit and implicit language knowledge. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 27, 305–352. 

Gigerenzer, G. (2007). Gut feelings. Short cuts to better decision making. Penguin Books.
Gigerenzer, G. (2020). How to explain behavior. Topics in Cognitive science, 12(4), 1363–1381. 

Goldberg, A. (2008). Universal grammar? Or prerequisites for natural languages. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31(5), 522–523. 

Gregg, K., Long, M. H., Jordan, G., & Beretta, A. (1997). Rationality and its discontents in SLA. Applied Linguistics, 18(4), 538–558. 

Hafenbrädl, S., Waeger, D., Marewski, J. N., & Gigerenzer, G. (2016). Applied decision making with fast-and-frugal heuristics. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 5, 215–231. 

Hulstijn, J. H. (2013). Is the second language acquisition discipline disintegrating? Language Teaching, 46(4), 511–517. 

Lakshmanan, U., & Selinker, L. (2001). Analysing interlanguage: How do we know what learners know? Second Language Research, 17, 393–420. 

Lardiere, D. (2003). The comparative fallacy revisited: A reply to Lakshmanan and Selinker (2001). Second Language Research, 19, 129–143. 

Long, M. H. (1993). Assessment strategies for SLA theories. Applied Linguistics, 14, 225–249. 

Long, M. H. (2015). First person singular: Building the road as we travel. Language Teaching, 48(4), 561–574. 

Long, M. H. (2016). Stefano Rastelli: Discontinuity in second language acquisition. The switch between statistical and grammatical learning. Book review. Applied Linguistics, 37(4), 590–597. 

Mehler, J., Peña, M., Nespor, M., & Bonatti, L. (2006). The soul of the language does not use statistics: Reflections on vowels and consonants. Cortex, 42(6), 846–854. 

Osterhout, L., McLaughlin, J., Pitkänen, I., Frenck-Mestre, C., & Molinaro, N. (2006). Novice learners, longitudinal designs and event-related potentials: A means for exploring the neurocognition of second language processing. In P. Indefrey & M. Gullberg (Eds.), The cognitive neuroscience of second language acquisition (pp. 199–230). Blackwell. 

Pallotti, G. (2021). Cratylus’ silence. On the philosophy and methodology of Complex Dynamic System Theory in SLA. Second Language Research. 

Raab, M., & Gigerenzer, G. (2015). The power of simplicity: A fast-and-frugal heuristics approach to performance science. Frontiers in Psychology. 

Rastelli, S. (2014). Discontinuity in second language acquisition: The switch between statistical and grammatical learning. Multilingual Matters. 

Rastelli, S. (2019). The Discontinuity Model: Statistical and grammatical learning in adult second language acquisition. Language Acquisition, 26(4), 387–415. 

Rastelli, S. (2020). Contingency learning and perfective morpheme productivity in L2 Italian: A study on lexeme–morpheme associations with ΔP. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 16(3), 459–486. 

Rastelli, S. (2021). Intra-language: The study of L2 morpheme productivity as within-item variance. International Review of Applied Linguistics IRAL. 

Rastelli, S. (forthcoming). Statistical and grammatical processing of auxiliaries in L2 Italian: An eye-tracking study.
Rastelli, S., & Murakami, A. (2022). Apparently identical verbs can be represented differently. Comparing L1-L2 inflection with contingency-based measure ΔP. Corpora, 17/1, 97–121. 

Ullman, M. T. (2020). The Declarative-Procedural Model. In B. VanPatten, G. D. Keating, & S. Wullf (Eds.), Theories in second language acquisition. An introduction (3rd ed., pp. 128–161). Routledge. 

Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 31 december 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.