Adult versus Child L2 Acquisition: An Information‐Processing Approach

Abstract

This article assumes that adult L2 learners cannot achieve the same degree of proficiency in their L2 that child L2 learners can. An information‐processing approach to this phenomenon is presented; the aspects of unitization, faulty or incomplete declarative knowledge, and limited working memory space are used to account for the deficiencies often found in adult learners' L2 competence. Once L1 procedural‐knowledge productions have become unitized, it is difficult to alter them. If an L2 production responds to the same cue as does an L1 production, interference from the L1 often occurs. Conscious effort is required to overcome these problems, as well as correct and complete declarative knowledge; however, in an actual communicative situation, conscious effort is focused most often on the semantics of the communication, rather than on the mechanical forms, and the strongest unitized (automatic) productions take over. Moreover, if the learner is able to focus on forms, he/she may not have all of the declarative‐knowledge of the L2 he or she needs or enough working memory space to manipulate all that is required. Justification for the application of a cognitive psychology model to L2 language learning is given. In addition, the information‐processing model is compared to a model that requires a totally separate language acquisition device to account for the same phenomenon.