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Foreign Language Learning

from the events that occur in the observable world.

The hypotheses advanced by cognitive psycholinguists assume that there are underlying principles of linguistic organization by which the language user construes and operates on his linguistic environment. Thus language users' perception and comprehension of utterances are considered to be the result of a complex interaction between external and internal events--the external acoustics and the internal percepts and comprehension process.

While cognitive psycholinguistics is rationalistic, it is important to note that theories of the perception and comprehension processes are materialistic theories. The cognitive processes that are postulated are believed to be affected by physical activity within the human brain. The postulated operations, while clearly unobservable, are all considered to have a physical basis.

Recent advances in theoretical linguistics, child language investigations, and preliminary experimentation in foreign language instruction indicate the primary role of comprehension in the acquisition of language. With the shift in the 1960s from structural grammars to transformational grammars, the enormous complexity of the human grammatical system was recognized and appreciated. Chomsky (1965) employed the phrase "tacit knowledge" to describe the knowledge a speaker has of the language he or she knows. This was to explain the observation that speakers can tell when an utterance is ungrammatical, but often cannot tell why. Chomsky also used the term "deep structure" to refer to the underlying structures of sentences. He used the term "tacit knowledge" to refer to the native speaker's implicit understanding of the rules that are used to generate the deep structures of sentences. Tacit knowledge is knowing without knowing why. Native speakers do not have explicit knowledge of the grammatical rules that they use to generate sentences. Speakers do not frame se...

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Foreign Language Learning. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:34, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1702468.html