Читать книгу Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL): A Methodology of Bilingual Teaching - Bernd Klewitz - Страница 9

However, studies in language acquisition also need to look at the gap between knowing and doing, in other words the difference between competence and performance. Whereas the most important components of a speaker’s linguistic knowledge are their lexicon and grammar, the ability to activate their linguistic competence in communicative interaction is equally decisive. As an illustration the well-known “tip-of-the tongue” phenomenon (TOT) is often quoted, a situation where speakers fail to recall a word or term, although they feel retrieval is imminent, “on the tip of their tongue”. It occurs at all ages and happens frequently enough to interfere with learning or in everyday situations:

Speakers experiencing it are momentarily not able to retrieve a word that they have used many times before and that they can use in spontaneous speech shortly afterwards. Thus, they obviously do know it. In fact, when offered a list of words, they reject the wrong ones. Even more interestingly, they may be able to identify certain properties of the word, like its initial sound, its number of syllables, or its meaning; or they can cite words that are similar in sound and meaning. This shows that the irretrievable element is not missing; yet it is only partially, not fully, accessible. It furthermore suggests that items in mental lexica can be retrieved in a number of different ways, not merely by their initial sounds (ibid.: 16).

There is no one explanation for this phenomenon. Either a speaker’s memory strength may not be strong enough to recall an item (direct-access view) or incorrect, but similar responses to a query come to mind; in this explanation these answers are termed blockers because they block the possibility to recall the correct item, once they are overcome retrieval will be possible again (blocking hypothesis; cf.: ibid.). If there are, then, different ways of activation, a successful retrieval depends on appropriate cues and lexical access, at the same time, occurs in stages. “Language learners must therefore develop both a grammatical competence and the proficiency to put it to use in a wide array of communicative contexts” (ibid.: 16). Thus, the question arises: What about bilinguals? Do they experience similar phenomena or is there a double load in their mental lexicon because of their increased linguistic load?

Experiments conducted by the American Psychological Association (APA 2020: n.p.) indicate that bilinguals, compared to their monolingual peers, are involved in a “doubled processing load” which can lead to difficulties in specific situations but otherwise be advantageous. Given the descriptions of visual objects and people’s names, Spanish-English bilinguals showed relatively better results in retrieving proper names, being more difficult to reproduce, than monolinguals:

… for a harder task, bilinguals showed relatively better performance. Bilingual disadvantages may be limited to representing multiple forms for individual meanings; proper names improved naming because they have essentially the same form across languages (ibid.).