Chapter published in:
Second Language Acquisition Theory: The legacy of Professor Michael H. Long
Edited by Alessandro G. Benati and John W. Schwieter
[Bilingual Processing and Acquisition 14] 2022
► pp. 101–112

Chapter 5
The uncertainty principle in second language acquisition

| Università di Pavia

This chapter presents three themes that I have discussed with Mike Long on different occasions in recent years: The Discontinuity Hypothesis, the necessity to study the ‘intra-language’ (in addition to the ‘interlanguage’) and the uncertainty principle. The latter is the idea that abstract rules and statistical regularities are entangled states of mind in a L2 learner’s competence, to the extent that researchers can never know whether learners are recognizing a morphosyntactic form (due to its frequency) or they are generating that form by a rule (due to abstract ‘labels that predate the input’). Uncertainty implies that what we can uncover about a learner’s implicit competence depends on how such competence is measured.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Mike and science
  • 2.Rationalism continued
  • 3.Second language development could be twofold
  • 4.Second language acquisition research could benefit from the study of intra-language
  • 5.Language competence could be permanently re-assembled and rehearsed during online performance
  • 6.The knowability issue
  • 7.The uncertainly principle and second language development
  • 8.Arrivederci
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 11 August 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/bpa.14.05ras
References
Ajemian, R., D’Ausilio, A., Moormand, E., & Bizzi, A.
(2013) A theory for how sensorimotor skills are learned and retained in noisy and nonstationary neural circuits. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 110 (52) E5078–E5087. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bizzi, E., & Ajemian, R.
(2015) A hard scientific quest: Understanding voluntary movements. Daedalus, 144 (1), 83–95. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bley-Vroman, R.
(2002) Frequency in production, comprehension and acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24 (2), 209–213. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Chater, N., & Christiansen, M. H.
(2010) Language acquisition meets language evolution. Cognitive Science, 34 (7): 1131–1157. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, N.
(1995) The minimalist program. The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Dekydspotter, L.
(2009) Second language epistemology. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 31 (2), 291–321. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ellis, N.
(2005) At the interface: Dynamic interactions of explicit and implicit language knowledge. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 27, 305–352. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gigerenzer, G.
(2007) Gut feelings. Short cuts to better decision making. Penguin Books.Google Scholar
(2020) How to explain behavior. Topics in Cognitive science, 12 (4), 1363–1381. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, A.
(2008) Universal grammar? Or prerequisites for natural languages. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31 (5), 522–523. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gregg, K., Long, M. H., Jordan, G., & Beretta, A.
(1997) Rationality and its discontents in SLA. Applied Linguistics, 18 (4), 538–558. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hafenbrädl, S., Waeger, D., Marewski, J. N., & Gigerenzer, G.
(2016) Applied decision making with fast-and-frugal heuristics. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 5 , 215–231. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hulstijn, J. H.
(2013) Is the second language acquisition discipline disintegrating? Language Teaching, 46 (4), 511–517. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jordan, G.
(2004) Theory construction in second language acquisition. John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lakshmanan, U., & Selinker, L.
(2001) Analysing interlanguage: How do we know what learners know? Second Language Research, 17 , 393–420. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lardiere, D.
(2003) The comparative fallacy revisited: A reply to Lakshmanan and Selinker (2001). Second Language Research, 19 , 129–143. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Long, M. H.
(1993) Assessment strategies for SLA theories. Applied Linguistics, 14 , 225–249. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2015) First person singular: Building the road as we travel. Language Teaching, 48 (4), 561–574. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2016) Stefano Rastelli: Discontinuity in second language acquisition. The switch between statistical and grammatical learning. Book review. Applied Linguistics, 37 (4), 590–597. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Mehler, J., Peña, M., Nespor, M., & Bonatti, L.
(2006) The soul of the language does not use statistics: Reflections on vowels and consonants. Cortex, 42 (6), 846–854. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Osterhout, L., McLaughlin, J., Pitkänen, I., Frenck-Mestre, C., & Molinaro, N.
(2006) Novice learners, longitudinal designs and event-related potentials: A means for exploring the neurocognition of second language processing. In P. Indefrey & M. Gullberg (Eds.), The cognitive neuroscience of second language acquisition (pp. 199–230). Blackwell. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pallotti, G.
(2021) Cratylus’ silence. On the philosophy and methodology of Complex Dynamic System Theory in SLA. Second Language Research. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Raab, M., & Gigerenzer, G.
(2015) The power of simplicity: A fast-and-frugal heuristics approach to performance science. Frontiers in Psychology. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Rastelli, S.
(2014) Discontinuity in second language acquisition: The switch between statistical and grammatical learning. Multilingual Matters. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2019) The Discontinuity Model: Statistical and grammatical learning in adult second language acquisition. Language Acquisition, 26 (4), 387–415. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2020) Contingency learning and perfective morpheme productivity in L2 Italian: A study on lexeme–morpheme associations with ΔP. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 16 (3), 459–486. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2021) Intra-language: The study of L2 morpheme productivity as within-item variance. International Review of Applied Linguistics IRAL. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
forthcoming). Statistical and grammatical processing of auxiliaries in L2 Italian: An eye-tracking study.
Rastelli, S., & Murakami, A.
(2022) Apparently identical verbs can be represented differently. Comparing L1-L2 inflection with contingency-based measure ΔP. Corpora, 17/1, 97–121. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ullman, M. T.
(2020) The Declarative-Procedural Model. In B. VanPatten, G. D. Keating, & S. Wullf (Eds.), Theories in second language acquisition. An introduction (3rd ed., pp. 128–161). Routledge. CrossrefGoogle Scholar