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The University of Southampton
The 14th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference

Keynote speakers

Here you can find further information about the keynote speakers for the GASLA14 Conference, including the title and abstract of their talks.

Main session:

Heather Marsden (University of York)

Searching for a common language: where do GenSLA research and the language classroom meet?

The GASLA conference in 2013 hosted a workshop on “Applying Generative SLA to the Language Classroom”, which—acknowledging the very minimal interaction between generative SLA (GenSLA) research and the practice of language teaching—aimed to present ways in which GenSLA could be informative for language teaching. However, as Widdowson (2000) cautioned, an endeavour to inform language teaching cannot succeed without a mediating relationship between the research and language teaching. This talk reflects on a three-year project to create opportunities for building such a relationship. Specifically, I will showcase highlights and challenges from two networks that I co-directed during 2014–2016 with the aim of fostering dialogue among language teachers, language learning researchers, and other stakeholders in language learning. The key activity of the networks was to hold workshops for researchers and teachers to share knowledge and ideas. We also conducted focus group meetings with teachers, created some preliminary video resources, and engaged with academic conferences and professional organisations. This talk takes stock of what was achieved, and considers where next for the endeavour of teacher-researcher dialogue and collaboration.

Mike Sharwood Smith (Heriot Watt University and Edinburgh University)

Expanding explanations: the life cycle of a representation

In this paper, I will present a processing-based 'working model' of the mind based on research findings across a range of disciplines within cognitive science. Both representational and processing accounts are incorporated within this model, or more properly, within this theoretical

'framework'. One aim of the framework is to provide a crossdisciplinary platform for integrating and explicating research findings in what are, in practice, often quite separate areas of language research. A platform like this arguably has not been available to researchers and, I hope to persuade my audience, is still wrongly regarded as a luxury extra or perhaps just something ‘for the future’. Nowadays, separate hypotheses and theories are typically developed and tested using terminology and techniques that facilitate empirical work only within one individual research area but do little to promote a combined view of what they all mean for our understanding of the mind.

After very briefly discussing the basic features of this framework, I will go on to show how language cognition fits with cognition in general. This will include accounting for how two or more languages can be accommodated within the same mind. The presentation will finish with sample implementations. This will include a precise definition of ‘acquisition’ as part of a developmental theory that explains in outline any type of cognitive growth or attrition, one that happens to be compatible with a generative, biolinguistic perspective. It will also include as an illustrative example, an explication of Lardiere’s feature reassembly. The presentation will be based on my book Introduction to language and cognition: mapping the mind (2107, Cambridge University Press) which is one spin off from Sharwood Smith & Truscott's The Multilingual Mind: a modular processing perspective (2014, Cambridge University Press). More information on this approach can be usefully obtained, in advance of the presentation, from http://www.mogulframework.com

Marit Westergaard (UiT The Arctic University of Norway and NTNU The Norwegian University of Science and Technology)

Micro-variation in multilingual situations

In this talk I will first introduce the micro-cue model of L1 acquisition and support it with data from child language, focusing on cases where there is micro-variation in the input (Westergaard 2009, 2014). Findings show that children are sensitive to fine distinctions in syntax and information structure from early on and that they are conservative learners, generally making errors of omission rather than commission (Snyder 2007). I will then sketch a research program investigating to what extent similar processes can be found in L2A and multilingual situations more generally. Considerable data show that adult L2 learners are not conservative, thus happy to make much larger generalizations than L1 children. Nevertheless, transfer/crosslinguistic difference can be argued to be selective, dependent on micro-variation in the L1. This is related to the idea put forward in Amaral & Roeper (2014) that transfer may only affect “simple rules”. In my interpretation, this means that transfer is local, applying property-by-property in quite small domains. This also resonates with recent proposals for L3 acquisition, the Scalpel Model (Slabakova 2016) and the Linguistic Proximity Model (Westergaard et al. 2016).

Invited speaker for the special session on linguistic input:

Jason Rothman (University of Reading and UiT The Arctic University of Norway)

Input Matters and Matters of Input

There is no question that input is the main (external) driving force of (all instances of) language acquisition. Notwithstanding access to domain specific linguistic mechanisms (e.g., Fodor, 1984; Chomsky 1957; 1981)—guaranteed for the child learner, the degree and nature of which is controversially debated for adults—acquisition is simply impossible in the absence of input. As cases such as Genie remind us (Curtiss, 1977), having Universal Grammar is necessary but not sufficient. Input matters a great deal! And, nativist approaches to language acquisition have never suggested otherwise. The stance of the generative paradigm is clear; input matters but it is not everything.

The more nuanced question is how to determine the relative weight of specific input in terms of shaping a learner’s grammar both over time (development) and its final state (ultimate attainment). Although it might be fair to say that generative approaches to language have historically not focused on the deterministic role input plays as much as other paradigms, recent trends in generative language acquisition (from monolingual children to various types of bilingualism) for more than a decade have turned our attention to it much more overtly (e.g., Yang, 2002; 2016; Westergaard, 2009; Pascual y Cabo and Rothman, 2012; Unsworth 2013, 2014; Rankin and Unsworth, 2016; Kupisch and Rothman, 2016; Yang and Montrul, 2017, a.o.). In the present talk, I will bring together insights from the study of bi-multilingual development in adulthood (e.g. the beginning stages of L3/Ln acquisition), the grammatical outcomes of childhood bilingualism (e.g. adult heritage speaker competence/performance) and issues/evidence pertaining to L1 maintenance under certain adult non-sequential bilingual conditions (e.g., L1 attrition) that speak to the deterministic role input plays in shaping grammatical competence in general. More specifically, we discuss how input considerations alter and delimit the learning task of non-monolinguals which in turn can account for at least some of the variation and divergent paths associated with all types of bilingual competence/performance.

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