Читать книгу The Psychology of Second Language Acquisition - Zoltan Dornyei - Страница 14

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 such little variability in its ultimate outcome. Berko Gleason (2005: 5), for example, concludes that ‘explaining what it is that children acquire during the course of language development is easier than explaining how they do it’, and N. Ellis (2005b: 3) adds that ‘never has there been so much debate as there currently is concerning the mechanisms of first language acquisition’.

The second source of puzzlement concerns the fact that although there is a general emphasis in the literature on the uniformity of the L1 acquisition process, a closer look reveals a great deal of individual-level variation in how native speakers acquire and use their L1. We tend to talk about ‘native-like proficiency’ in a language, but the content of this term is rather difficult to define scientifically beyond Doughty’s (2003: 258) specification that children learning their L1 are ‘eventually indistinguishable from other native speakers of their speech community’. Yet, within the L1 speech community there appears to be a considerable diversity across L1 speakers’ command of their mother tongue, from their pronunciation to their syntactic or pragmatic skills. A detailed analysis of the variability in L1 acquisition goes beyond the scope of this book, although some aspects of it will be addressed in Chs. 5 and 6; let me conclude here with a thought-provoking comment by Bohannon and Bonvillian (2005: 273):