SOME AFFECTIVE, PSYCHOLINGUISTIC, AND NEUROLINGUISTIC FACTORS IN ESL ACQUISITION SOME AFFECTIVE, PSYCHOLINGUIS

There is an interesting relationship in English between the various connotations of the word affect. As a transitive verb, it may mean to produce an effect (a change) in something or somebody, or it may mean to give the appearance of, to pretend, to feign. As a noun, it stands for the experience of feelings or emotions, "ranging from the utmost pain to the utmost pleasure, from the simplest to the most complex sensations, and from the most normal to the most pathological reactions. Affect, or 'feeling tone', colors our entire psychic life and is experienced on both a conscious and an unconscious level" (Goldenson, 1984, p. 21). The formal relationship between these various connotations implies that an emotional or feeling state produces an effect on the environments (external and internal) while giving an appearance which may or may not betray the inner feelings, depending on the interlocutor's perception. Perhaps the most important aspects of this multiconnotative situation to remember are Ferdinand de Saussure's concept of "the arbitrariness of the sign" and Wilhelm von Humboldt's remark that "Language makes infinite use of finite media", from a cognitive perspective, and that affects permeate all communication, from a sensory perspective.

Affective information is "an integral part of real-world communication" (Morley, 1991, p. 88). Therefore, instructional activities a

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s. What is remarkable is that at each stage the language is not a substandard form of adult language; rather, it is a sui generis interlanguage, i.e. an independent linguistic system. What the genetic input is, and how interlanguages progress to mature languaging are still unfathomed areas of language development (Aitchison, 1989). After all, "People do not think in English, or Chinese or Apache: they think in a language of thought" (Pinker, 1994, p. 81). Speech comprehension is an active process whereby the listener reconstructs the input on the basis of clues as well as on his or her expectations. Speech production is possibly a more complex procedure, in which future speech segments are anticipated as others are being uttered. Simultaneously, the speaker scans his or her word and sentence-pattern inventories for the most appropriate expression. Should he or she stumble in this scanning process, there may result stuttering, malapropisms, or slips of the tongue (Ellis & Beattie, 1986). Thus, the mind resorts to extensive parallel processing. How the mind selects and suppresses the various items in its inventory is still unknown (Garnham, 1985). Goodman (1965) proposed that reading is a psycholinguistic process in which readers
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