constitutes the first principles that make cognitive neuroscience distinct from physiological psychology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, or neuropsychology?’ The authors’ answer is that the characteristic feature of the new discipline is its well-balanced hybrid nature, integrating cognitive theory with neuropsychological and neuroscientific evidence, as well as computational techniques. This seems to be an idyllic ‘marriage of the cognitive and brain sciences’ (Baars and Gage 2007b: p. xiii).
Cognitive neuroscience and SLA
With language use being one of the most prominent human cognitive functions, a great deal of neuroscientific research has been directed at capturing ‘in vivo’ images of brain processes during a wide range of language tasks. Armed with powerful neuroimaging tools, several laboratories in the world have set out to map the language faculty in the human brain. (See Ch. 2 for more details.) Pulvemüller (2002: 9) justifies these neuropsychological efforts by pointing out that it is almost certain that language mechanisms in the brain are organized as nerve cells and their mutual connections, and a ‘realistic model of language, therefore, must specify the putative organic basis of language use and language comprehension in terms of neurons, neuronal connections, and neuron circuits’. Arguing in a similar vein, Lamb (1999) asserts that a realistic theory of language needs to go beyond merely accounting for various processes and patterns in the output of the human linguistic system (which, as we have seen, has been the traditional practice of linguistic analysis) by also providing ‘neurological plausibility’.
While most scholars would agree in principle with Pulvemüller and Lamb’s contention, Jacobs (2004) explains that a common objection to paying neuroscience more than mere lip service in language acquisition circles has been the claim that not enough is known about the brain to make significant contributions to our understanding of how language is acquired. In the light of the growing body of relevant research literature, however, this dismissive attitude is less and less tenable. (For a recent overview of the cognitive neuroscience of SLA, see Gullberg and Indefrey 2006.) While the picture emerging from cognitive neuroresearch on L1 and L2 issues has been admittedly rather ‘noisy’, we are getting an increasingly accurate sense of what kind of mental metaphors are simply not plausible in terms of their underlying neural foundation. This point is argued forcefully by Schumann (2004a) when he claims that in the twenty-first century we simply cannot afford not to impose certain neurobiological constraints on our conceptualization of language processes. The increasing amount of neuroscientific information available to SLA researchers about the bilingual brain (see e.g. Abutalebi, Cappa, and Perani 2005) offers sufficient munitions in this respect, and it is one of the main intentions of this book to provide the readers with enough background knowledge to be able to make use of this accumulating neuroscientific evidence.
Interim summary: the permeability of disciplinary boundaries
We have arrived at a new phase of studying the acquisition and processing of language, and one of the most obvious characteristics of modern times is the increasing fluidity of academic identities and the growing permeability of disciplinary boundaries. Nobody is surprised nowadays to see, for example, a former hardcore generative linguist becoming engaged in developmental psycholinguistic research (perhaps also doing some neuroimaging on the side), and it does not seem strange at all that a scholar might align him/herself simultaneously with applied, cognitive, and psycholinguistics. There is an increasing amount of common ground in the various subdisciplines, making it possible to straddle the borders between them or to completely cross the boundaries, dipping in and out. Thus, it seems to me that the main academic organizational force at present is not so much the inherent content of the various disciplines and strands as the individual scholars’ subjective affiliation to professional organizations and conferences as their main reference points.
Interestingly, the academic community is behaving very much like a complex system would, with new directions and groupings emerging as a result of the field’s self-organizing capacity. A classic example of this emergent feature is the appearance of ‘bilingualism’ as an academic rubric: strictly speaking it is not an academic discipline (and, accordingly, I will discuss it in more detail later under the various types of language attainment) and yet it has now its own journals and well-attended international conventions – in fact, an increasing number of scholars who used to call themselves applied linguists, psycholinguists, or SLA researchers now fly the bilingualism banner. It would be an intriguing study to apply dynamic systems theory (See Ch. 3) to the analysis of the evolution and sociology of SLA research. In any case, the main lesson for our current purpose is that we need not worry too much about the exact labelling of research directions. My personal feeling is that we are all inevitably becoming, at least partially, cognitive neuroscientists specializing in second language issues.
Main avenues to language attainment
The term ‘language acquisition’ often occurs in the language-related psychological literature without any specification as to whether the authors are talking about the acquisition of an L1 or an L2, let alone specifying the exact type of these broad categories. Looking more closely at these texts we will usually find that ‘language acquisition’ refers to mother-tongue attainment only, with relatively few language psychologists addressing the unique issues of L2 acquisition and processing. Although in their influential text on psycholinguistics, Berko Gleason and Bernstein Ratner (1998: p. v) state that a ‘psycholinguistic discussion of language processing would not be complete without consideration of bilingualism and second language learning’, this is not (as yet) the standard position in psychology.
It has been pointed out by many that the majority of the people living in the world speak more than one language and therefore the norm is not monolingualism but bilingualism. So why is there such an obvious reluctance in psychologists to consider second language issues? And how much can we generalize findings from L1 acquisition studies to SLA? What are the similarities and differences between the two processes? Are there situations (e.g. early learning) when SLA can be seen as virtually identical to L1 acquisition? Can we distinguish two types of SLA depending on whether the L2 is primarily acquired in the host environment or in a formal school setting? And more generally, what are the main types of bilingualism and how do they differ in psychological terms? These are some of the central questions that will be addressed in our exploration of the psychological basis of SLA in the following chapters. Let us have a preliminary overview of the main issues here.
First language acquisition
Infants learn language with remarkable speed, but how they do it remains a mystery.
Although in theory the study of L1 acquisition falls outside the SLA focus of this book, the following chapters will contain a surprisingly large amount of material that is derived from the study of mother-tongue learning. This is because the comparison between L1 and L2 acquisition is enlightening both when we find similarities and when the two processes display deviating features. Accordingly, the process of how infants master their first language will be a recurring theme throughout this book and therefore I would like to address four general issues here concerning L1 acquisition and its research: (1) mysterious uniformity; (2) nature versus nurture; (3) the evolution of language acquisition research; and (4) early milestones in L1 development.
Mysterious uniformity of L1 acquisition
One of the most common statements about L1 acquisition in the literature concerns the remarkable uniformity of the process. Indeed, there seems to be a general agreement amongst scholars that children acquire an impressive amount of language in a comparatively short time without much direct tuition and with remarkable commonality (Shatz 2007). This uniformity is quite mysterious in at least two ways: first, after decades of intensive research, we still do not know enough about the details of the acquisition process or why there is
