Restructuring

BARRY MCLAUGHLINUniversity of California, Santa Cruz

This paper argues for a cognitive psychological approach to second languagephenomena that emphasizes the importance of the development of auto-maticity and the process of restructuring. It is argued that practice can lead toimprovement in performance as sub-skills become automated, but it is alsopossible for increased practice to create conditions for restructuring, withattendant decrements in performance as learners reorganize their internalrepresentational framework. In the second case, performance may follow aU-shaped curve, declining as more complex internal representations replaceless complex ones, and increasing again as skill becomes expertise. Examplesare drawn from first and second language research, and from research onexpert systems. The cognitive approach is not seen as competitive to, but ascomplementary with, linguistic approaches to second language development.

In the past two decades a major development has occurred in psychology as thefield moved away from the behaviourism of the past to contemporary cognitivepsychology. There were several consequences of this metanoia. For one thing,psychologists returned to psychological questions. Contemporary cognitivepsychology emphasizes knowing, rather than responding. Cognitive psycholo-gists are concerned with finding scientific means for studying the mentalprocesses involved in the acquisition and application of knowledge. The focus isnot stimulus-response bonds, but mental events. To paraphrase Chomsky,calling psychology 'behavioral science' is like designating natural science 'thescience of meter readings' (Chomsky 1968: 58). To call psychology the scienceof behavior is to confuse the evidence studied (behavior) with the goal of thestudy (understanding of the human mind).

A second characteristic of the cognitive approach is that it emphasizes mentalstructure or organization. The argument is that human knowledge is organizedand that new input is interpreted in the light of this organization. Here the field isespecially indebted to Jean Piaget, the Swiss scholar who maintained that allliving creatures are born with an invariant tendency to organize experience, andthat this tendency provides the impetus for cognitive development.

Finally, the cognitive approach, in contrast to behaviorism, stresses thenotion that the individual is active, constructive, and planful, rather than apassive recipient of environmental stimulation. For cognitive psychology, anycomplete account of human cognition must include an analysis of the plans orstrategies people use for thinking, remembering, and understanding andproducing language.

It is important to note that these strategies are volitional, in that they can be

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114 RESTRUCTURING

adopted or not, at the discretion of the person. This does not mean, however,that the person always exerts conscious control over which strategies are calledinto action, nor does it mean that the person is capable of describing thestrategies in detail. For example, when engaged in conversation, speakers areusing strategies for understanding and producing sentences, yet if asked toexplain exactly how these strategies were being used, they would not be able todo so. Using a computer analogy, we can say that speakers store programs(strategies) in memory that enable them to understand and produce language.They can execute these programs when they wish to do so, but are not able toexamine and report the details of the program.

In this paper I will discuss a cognitive psychological perspective to secondlanguage learning and the centrality of the restructuring process to under-standing how individuals learn second languages.

SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING AS A COMPLEX COGNITIVE SKILLConsider the following report of a schizophrenic patient:

I'm not sure of my own movements any more . . . 1 found recently that I was thinking ofmyself doing things before 1 would do them. If I'm going to sit down for example, I'vegot to think of myself and almost see myself sitting down before I do it. It's the same withother things like washing, eating, and even dressing—things that I have done at one timewithout even bothering or thinking about at al l . . . I take more time to do things becauseI am always conscious of what I am doing. If I could just stop noticing what I am doing. . . I have to do everything step by step now, nothing is automatic. Everything has to beconsidered. (McGhie 1969)

Of course, this is a very dysfunctional situation. If we had to think throughordinary activities before we did them, we would not be able to manage our livesvery well.

What we see in this patient is a breakdown in the automaticity that is soimportant for normal functioning. We perform numerous complex tasks in ourdaily lives automatically, without thinking about them. But this was not alwaysthe case; we had to learn to perform the operations involved in these complexskills by focusing attention on them. In his movie From Cup to Lip, the psychol-ogist, Jerome Bruner, demonstrates how getting a cup to her lips is no small featfor a seven-month-old infant. Later in life, learning to use a clutch or master thebackhand in tennis are tasks that require a great deal of attention—or whatcognitive psychologists call 'controlled processing'. After one has practiced thetask, components of these skills become automatic, and controlled processing isrequired only in unusual cases. When you have been driving for many years, youcan carry on a conversation as long as no emergencies arise; but if you have todrive on a very icy road, controlled processing is called into play and it isdifficult to keep a conversation going.

With enough practice, it is possible for people to carry out quite amazingfeats. In one experiment, after extended practice, subjects were able to read astory aloud while writing down another story from dictation (Solomons and

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BARRY MCLAUGHLIN I 15

Stein 1896, cited in Howard 1983). In this case, presumably, reading hadbecome so automatic that the subjects could devote attention to the other task.Note that cognitive psychologists see the same principles applying to complexskills such as reading, writing, or learning a second language as apply in the caseof motor skills such as driving, typing, or playing tennis.

In short, within the framework of contemporary cognitive psychology,complex cognitive skills are learned and routinized (i.e. become automatic)through the initial use of controlled processes. Controlled processing requiresattention and takes time, but through practice, sub-skills become automatic andcontrolled processes are free to be allocated to higher levels of processing. Thuscontrolled processing can be said to lay down the 'stepping stones' for automaticprocessing as the learner moves to more and more difficult levels (Shiffrin andSchneider 1977).

In this conceptualization, complex tasks are characterized by a hierarchicalstructure. That is, such tasks consist of sub-tasks and their components. Theexecution of one part of the task requires the completion of various smallercomponents. As Levelt (1977) noted, carrying on a conversation is an exampleof a hierarchical task structure (Table 1). The first-order goal is to express aparticular intention. To do this, the speaker must decide on a topic and select acertain syntactic schema. In turn, the realization of this schema requires sub-activities, such as formulating a series of phrases to express different aspects ofthe intention. But to utter the phrases there is the need for lexical retrieval, theactivation of articulatory patterns, utilization of appropriate syntactic rules, etc.Each of these component skills needs to be executed before the higher-ordergoal can be realized, although there may be some parallel processing in realtime.

Note the importance, in this conceptualization, of practice. The developmentof any complex cognitive skill is thought to require building up a set of well-learned, automatic procedures so that controlled processes are freed for newlearning. From a practical standpoint, the necessary component is overlearning.A skill must be practiced again and again and again, until no attention isrequired for its performance. Repetitio est mater studiorum —practice, repeti-tion, time on task—these seemed to be the critical variables for successfulacquisition of complex skills, including complex cognitive skills such as secondlanguage learning.

Table 1: The hierarchical task structure of speaking

First-order goal: lo express a particular intentionSecond-order goal: to decide on a topicThird-order goal: to formulate a series of phrasesLower-order goals: to retrieve the lexicon needed

to activate articulatory patternsto utilize appropriate syntactic rulesto meet pragmatic conventions

Based on Levelt 1977

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116 RESTRUCTURING

This conceptualization, however, leaves something out of the picture, andruns contrary to the experience of researchers in the second language field. Asone of these researchers put it in a 'state-of-the-art' paper:

Practice does not make perfectEven though there are acquisition sequences, acquisition is not simply linear orcumulative, and having practised a particular form or pattern does not mean that theform or pattern is permanently established. Learners appear to forget forms andstructures which they had seemed previously to master and which they had extensivelypractised. (Some researchers have referred to 'U-shaped development'.)

This author, Patsy Lightbown, went on to discuss some of her own research:

Learners were—for months at a time—presented with one or a small number of formsto learn and practise, and they learned them in absence of related contrasting forms.When they did encounter new forms, it was not a matter of simply adding them on.Instead the new forms seemed to cause a restructuring of the whole system. (Lightbown1985:177)

RESTRUCTURINGThese comments made sense, and helped clarify some puzzling data from astudy of second language reading (McLeod and McLaughlin 1986). The datacame from an analysis of errors that speakers of differing degrees of proficiencyin English made when reading aloud. We found that the errors that beginningESL students made were primarily nonmeaningful, which was seen to be due tothese students focusing on the graphic aspects of the text. That is, they wouldmake errors like She shook the piggy bank and out came some many (formoney); whereas native speakers were more likely to make meaningful errors,such as She shook the piggy bank and out came some dimes .It was expected thatthe proportion of meaningful errors for advanced ESL students would fallsomewhere between what was found for beginning ESL students and nativespeakers. But instead, it was found that advanced ESL students, who had amuch superior grasp of the syntactic and semantic constraints of English (asshown by their performance on a cloze test), made as many nonmeaningfulerrors as the beginning students (Table 2).

Table 2: Group differences on dependent variables

Group

BeginningESLAdvancedESLNativeSpeakers

Cloze test

mean

3.5

6.8

9.7

sd

2.2

2.4

0.6

Proportion ofmeaningfulerrorsmean sd

.20 .14

.29 .17

.79 .17

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BARRY MCLAUGHLIN I 17

Research on learning to read in a second language suggests that there are atleast three stages:

1 First, the learner must master the rules governing symbol-sound correspon-dences in the target language.

2 The learner must be able to use those rules in learning words and mustprogressively refine and automate word-decoding operations.

3 Building on automated decoding skills, the learner must acquire and perfect acomplex set of processing skills that allows for rapid processing of incomingmaterial and the extraction of meaning.

Beginning readers may have mastered the mechanical aspects of reading, butcontinue to process the text word by word, not using contextual semanticrelations and syntactic information to comprehend meaning (Cromer 1970).

What was surprising was that more advanced learners in the McLeod andMcLaughlin (1986) study were apparently doing the same thing. Their errorsshowed that they were not utilizing semantic and syntactic cues as well as theycould have. They were not approaching the task as 'a psycholinguistic guessinggame' in which graphic cues were used to make predictions about what theprinted text means, even though the evidence from the cloze test suggests thatthey were quite capable of making such predictions. Their increasing syntacticand semantic competence enabled them to make nearly twice as many accuratepredictions as the beginners on the cloze test, yet they did not apply thiscompetence to their reading behavior.

This suggests a process of restructuring had not yet occurred. What seemed tobe happening was that the advanced subjects were using old strategies aimed atdecoding, in a situation where their competencies would have allowed them toapply new strategies directed at meaning. Their performance on the cloze testindicated that they had the skills needed for "going for meaning'. Presumablythey read this way in their first language, but they had not yet made the shift(restructured) in their second language. In this language, they did not makestrategic use of the semantic and syntactic knowledge at their disposal. Indeed,other researchers obtained very similar results in second language reading(Clarke 1979).

THE RESTRUCTURING CONCEPTThe concept of restructuring can be traced in the psychological literature to thedevelopmental psychologist, Jean Piaget. The Piagetian structuralist approachmaintains that cognitive development is an outcome of underlying structuralchanges in the cognitive system. Just what constitutes structural change has beena topic of some debate (see Globerson 1986; Karmiloff-Smith 1986). Suffice itto say that there appears to be agreement that not just any change constitutesrestructuring. Restructuring is characterized by discontinuous, or qualitative,change as the child moves from stage to stage in development. Each new stageconstitutes a new internal organization and not merely the addition of newstructural elements.

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Recent concern with restructuring in developmental psychology reflects anew emphasis on the dynamics of change and a reaction to what had becomeknown as the 'snapshot problem'. That is, developmental psychologists becameconcerned that their knowledge of cognitive growth consisted of a series of'snapshots' of the child's abilities at various points in development, but that theyknew little about how the child progressed from snapshot to snapshot. Theanalogy in the field of second language research is the concern (expressed bysuch authors as Hatch 1978; Huebner 1983; Long and Sato 1984) that there ismuch known about linguistic products, but little known of the dynamics ofpsycholinguistic processes.

From an information processing perspective, restructuring can be seen as aprocess in which the components of a task are coordinated, integrated, orreorganized into new units, thereby allowing the procedure involving oldcomponents to be replaced by a more efficient procedure involving newcomponents (Cheng 1985). To study restructuring is to focus on the mechan-isms of transition that are called into play as the learner modifies internalized,cognitive representations. Several examples of discontinuous change in thelinguistic development of the child illustrate this process.

Discontinuities in linguistic developmentOne developmental shift that has received considerable attention is thetransition from examplar-based representations to more rule-based representa-tions. The classic example comes from morphological development, speci-fically, the development of English irregular past forms, such as came, went,broke, which are supplanted by rule-governed, but deviant past forms: corned,goed, breaked. In time, these new forms are themselves replaced by theirregular forms that appeared in the initial stage. This is an instance of thefamous U-shaped developmental curve.

Recently, this process has been discussed in detail by Karmiloff-Smith(1986), who argued that children attack new problems by going through thesame recurrent phases. Phase 1 is the stage of automaticity and is data-driven;components of the task are mastered, but there is no attempt at overall organiza-tion. Organization is imposed at phase 2, when behavior is dominated by'organization-oriented procedures', which result from the learner's attempts tosimplify, unify, and gain control over the internal representation. Phase 3involves the integration of the data-driven, bottom-up processes that guidephase 1 and the internally-generated, top-down processes that guide phase 2.This integration results from the restructuring at work in phase 2, which, onceconsolidated, can take environmental feedback into account without jeopardiz-ing the overall organization.

As in morphological development, work on lexical development indicates asimilar movement from exemplar-based to rule-based representations. Forexample, young children may consider age, appearance, and behavior to befundamental to the meaning of uncle, whereas older children will focus onkinship definition even in the face of highly uncharacteristic features. Tradition-

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BARRY McLAUGHL/N 119

ally, this shift was thought to occur at a specific point in development and torepresent a general change in cognitive development (Vygotsky 1962). Recentwork by Keil and his associates (Keil 1983; Keil and Caroll 1980) indicates,however, that the shift occurs at different times for different concepts, and isdetermined primarily by the structures of the concepts themselves rather thanby a general transition from instance-bound knowledge to more rule-governedknowledge. This work suggests that restructuring can be modular, in the sensethat development in one domain could look very different at a given point intime from development in another domain.

An example of restructuring in syntactic development was reported bySlobin (1987), who cited the case of an English-speaking child who hadgrammaticized a distinction that is not grammaticized in the English language.The child used / and my as subjects of sentences, with the constraint that myappeared in 'hot' emotional contexts, such as My like cookies, whereas / wasused in more neutral contexts, as in I like peas. Note that both subjects couldbe used with the same verb. In time, of course, this way of marking hotemotionality had to be abandoned as the child restructured his language toconform to target norms.

Finally, the sudden discontinuous shifts that characterize the restructuringprocess can be seen in the development of comprehension, specifically thecomprehension of metaphors. Recent research suggests that the ability tocomprehend metaphors depends on the organization of the relevant knowledgeneeded to create metaphors—in particular, on the child's ability to juxtaposesemantic fields. Only after the relevant semantic fields are developed can thechild perceive metaphorical relations. Thus, young children are usually able toperceive metaphorical relations between animal terms and automobiles (Thecar is thirsty), but not between human eating terms and ways of reading a book(He gobbled up the book), because in this second case the semantic fields arenot as well developed. Furthermore, research indicates that metaphoricalunderstanding does not develop gradually, but that whole classes of metaphorsbecome comprehensible all at once, as the sets of meanings that constitutesemantic fields are acquired (Keil 1983).

MechanismsSeveral mechanisms have been proposed to account for such transitional shifts.Bowerman (1987) has distinguished two types of mechanisms: those that are'off-line' in the sense that they occur without the child's awareness, and thosethat require 'on-line' attention. Off-line processes involve covert review of theexisting repertory for regularities and exceptions. Thus forms that werepreviously independent become linked through common rules (as in theexample of irregular verbs), or two words that were used interchangeablybecome differentiated.

The explication procedure described by Karmiloff-Smith (1986) would alsoinvolve off-line processes. Restructuring occurs because learners go beyond the

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success of phase 1 and attempt to control and link previously isolatedprocedures into a unified representational framework:

... my argument has been that the human organism (both linguistic and cognitive)incorporates a drive to have control not only over the external environment (the inputstimuli) but also, and importantly, over its own internal representations and finally overthe intricate interaction between the two. (Karmiloff-Smith 1986:175)

Thus, in this view, once the procedures at any phase become automatized,consolidated, and function efficiently, learners step up to a 'metaprocedural'level, which generates representational change and restructuring.

More on-line processes occur when learners monitor their mistakes orencounter data that cannot be handled by their grammar. Thus discrepanciesbecome the impetus for new developmental change. The child acquiring syntaxmight develop movement rules for negation and wh questions that are other-wise adequate, but that require restructuring when the goal is to producenegative questions.

From an information-processing perspective, the mechanisms of changeinvolved in restructuring result from the child's developing capacities. Thus inthe example of comprehending metaphors, the child's growing capacity to formconceptually linked, and increasingly differentiated, semantic fields leads to therevelation of new relations to other domains through analogies, similarities,oppositions, and the like.

Nonetheless, it is clear that not enough is currently known about themechanisms involved in restructuring. Some authors stress the suddenness ofshifts in the learner's internal representations. Thus, the argument runs,understanding the mechanisms of restructuring will best come about if attentionis given to changes that occur at the beginning and end of plateaus in develop-ment (Globerson 1986). Other researchers note that structural changes canoccur in subtle and gradual ways and that evidence for restructuring might belost sight of if too much emphasis is put upon abruptness (Clark 1987).

RESTRUCTURING IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNINGTurning now to the second language literature: What evidence is there forrestructuring and what does this process tell us about how people learn a secondlanguage? This discussion begins by examining briefly evidence for restructur-ing in syntactic and semantic development, and then turns to the role of strategyshifts in restructuring.

Syntactic developmentThere have been a number of reports of discontinuities in second languagesyntactic development that indicate restructuring. For example, Wode, Bahns,Bedey, and Frank (1978) found evidence for the initial appearance of correctirregular verb forms that are subsequently regularized to goed, corned, and thelike, before the correct forms reappear. Lightbown (1985) cited Hyltenstam's(1977) work on the acquisition of the negative in Swedish as evidence that new

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BARRY MCLAUGHLIN I 21

forms were not simply added on, but caused a restructuring of the entire system.Kellerman (1983) saw the acquisition of the English modal past form as aninstance of U-shaped behavior in Dutch second language learners. Theselearners apparently go through a process of imposing Dutch structures onEnglish, which yields target-like and non-target-like forms, before they under-stand and apply the English rule correctly.

One way of looking at syntactic restructuring is to view it as a transitional shiftthat occurs between two stages in the process of form-function mappings. Ellis(1985) has described these stages in the following terms. First, there is anassimilation phase during which learners form hypotheses that may or may notcorrespond to target language rules. This leads to a situation where two or moreforms may be used in free variation. His example was the use of two negativeforms (no and don't) in free variation in both indicative and imperativesentences. This is followed by a second stage, in which an economy principlereplaces the strategy of blanket assimilation, as the learner tries to maximizelinguistic resources by creating a system in which different forms serve differentfunctions. Unless alternative forms can be justified by allocating them todifferent functions, redundant forms will be eliminated from the interlanguage.For example, Ellis's learner used only don't in imperatives.

In the initial stage of this progression there is non-systematic variationbecause new forms are assimilated that have not yet been integrated into thelearner's form-function system. Systematic variation occurs in the second stagewhen the new forms have been accommodated by a restructuring of the existingform-function system to give the new forms their own meanings to perform.Eventually, learners restructure their knowledge until they sort out form-function relationships (though some learners never reach this third stage).

Lightbown (1985) pointed out that second language acquisition is not simplylinear and cumulative, but is characterized by backsliding and loss of forms thatseemingly were mastered. She attributed this decline in performance to aprocess whereby learners have mastered some forms and then encounter newones that cause a restructuring of the whole system:

[Restructuring] occurs because language is a complex hierarchical system whosecomponents interact in non-linear ways. Seen in these terms, an increase in error rate inone area may reflect an increase in complexity or accuracy in another, followed byovergeneralization of a newly acquired structure, or simply by a sort of overload ofcomplexity which forces a restructuring, or at least a simplification, in another part ofthe system. (1985:177)

A good example of this type of restructuring is found in the work of JurgenMeisel and his colleagues (Meisel, Clahsen, and Pienemann 1981) on theacquisition of movement rules in German by untutored immigrant workers.These researchers found that passage through the developmental stages inGerman word order involved a temporary deletion of elements previouslymastered. Thus learners would omit certain forms over which they had to moveother forms, such as object noun phrases, or would leave out categories to be

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122 RESTRUCTURING

inverted, such as subjects or verbs. This apparent backsliding resulted from atemporary restructuring of the system that involved a simplification of certainelements to allow for the development of other elements.

Semantic developmentIn a recent article, Ard and Gass (1987) examined transitional developments inthe acquisition of structural patterns by second language learners. Theyaddressed the question of whether syntactic development can be reduced tolexical learning in the sense that what may appear to be syntactic learning is inactuality a matter of learning the structural frames into which lexical items canenter. Their data suggest that syntactic patterns develop piecemeal, withlearners acquiring lexical items as unique bits of language information. It is onlyat later stages of development that lexical tadpoles are replaced by syntacticfrogs. Thus, in a general sense, development in a second language may involvethe interaction of lexical and syntactic processes, with restructuring occurring asone or the other process predominates.

Within the lexical domain, development in a second language consists ofmapping two lexical and conceptual systems onto each other. Across twolanguages words may roughly correspond in meaning, but few word pairscompletely overlap in all their lexical functions. Two languages may differ in thenumber and nature of distinctions made within a common, shared concept or inthe linguistic distinctions made between semantic categories. In many instances,a lexical item in the second language cannot be directly mapped onto a conceptexisting in the first language, and the learner has to restructure existing firstlanguage concepts or develop a new concept that corresponds to a lexical itemin the second language (Ijaz 1986).

An instance of such lexical restructuring comes from Kellerman's work(1983). In this research Dutch university students and school children wereasked to judge the acceptability of English expressions involving break. Dutchand English share both transitive and intransitive uses of break. Younger Dutchlearners of English accepted both uses, presumably because they are transfer-ring from Dutch or responding to both uses in the L2 input. Older learners,however, rejected English sentences exemplifying the intransitive use of break.Thus more advanced learners are actually performing less well in judging theacceptability of such sentences.

Kellerman argued that the reason for the decline in performance is that olderlearners become sensitized to the pragmatic distinction between causative andnon-causative meanings of verbs such as break. Restructuring occurs as olderlearners seize upon and manipulate what appear to be important functionaldistinctions (such as the distinction between causative and non-causative verbs)and attempt to give them distinct surface forms, rejecting forms where thesedistinctions are not made. Younger learners, who have had less instruction andare less sophisticated metalinguistically, are less likely to be aware of thesefunctional distinctions.

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BARRY MCLAUGHLIN 123

Strategy shiftsA common strategy adopted by young second language learners (and, perhapsby more older second language learners than we realize) is to memorizeformulas (Hakuta 1976; Wong Fillmore 1976). Some children are capable ofamazing feats of imitation, producing multi-word utterances, which, it turns out,they understand only vaguely. Such unanalyzed chunks appear to showevidence of a sophisticated knowledge of the lexicon and syntax, but it hasbecome clear that such holistic learning is a communicative stategy that secondlanguage learners use to generate input from native speakers (Wong Fillmore1976).

Subsequently, formulas are gradually 'unpacked' and used as the basis formore productive speech. At this stage, the learner's speech is simpler but moredifferentiated syntactically. Whereas utterances were as long as six or sevenwords in the initial stage, they are now much shorter. The learner has at thispoint adopted a new strategy, one of rule analysis and consolidation. The shiftfrom formulaic speech to rule analysis is another example of the transition fromexemplar-based representations to more rule-based representations.

Representational changes of this nature are the focus of one of the majorresearch enterprises of contemporary cognitive psychology, understandingnovice-expert shifts. As the name implies, the study of the novice-expert shift isthe study of the change that occurs as a beginner in some domain gains expertise.Many domains have been studied—most extensively, expertise at chess, in thephysical sciences, in computer programming, and in mathematical problemsolving.

For the most part, these studies show that experts restructure the elements ofa learning task into abstract schemata that are not available to novices, whofocus principally on the surface elements of a task. Thus experts replacecomplex sub-elements with schemata that allow more abstract processing. Forexample, Chase and Simon (1975) replicated de Groot's (1965) finding thatMaster chess players reconstructed with greater than 90 percent accuracymidgame boards they had seen for only five seconds. They observed that Masterplayers recalled clusters that formed attack or defense configurations, whereasbeginners lacked the skill to form such abstract representations. McKeithen,Reitman, Rueter, and Hirtle (1981) found that intermediate programmersclustered the words of a programming language by concept, whereas novicesclustered the same words alphabetically. Strategy differences were alsoreported by Adelson (1981, 1984), who found that expert programmers usedabstract, conceptually based representations when attempting to recallprogramming material, whereas novices used more concrete representations.

In the domain of language learning, experts are those individuals who havelearned a number of languages. There is considerable anecdotal evidence thatonce a person has learned a new language, subsequent language learning isgreatly facilitated. Presumably, there is some positive transfer that results fromthe process of language learning and carries over to the learning of a newlanguage. Several studies bear on this hypothesis.

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124 RESTRUCTURING

Nation and McLaughlin (1986) carried out an experiment in which theycompared information processing in multilingual, bilingual, and monolingualsubjects learning a miniature linguistic system. The goal was to see how 'expert'language learners (multilingual subjects) compared in their performance withmore 'novice' language learners. Subjects were asked to learn a miniaturelinguistic system consisting of letter strings under conditions in which they weremerely exposed to the system without instructions to learn it (Implicit learning),or under conditions in which they were told that the system was rule-based andthey should learn the rules (Explicit learning).

Multilingual subjects were found to learn the grammar significantly betterthan bilingual or monolingual groups when the instructions called for 'Implicit'learning, but not when the instructions called for 'Explicit' learning. Nation andMcLaughlin argued on the basis of their data that the superior performance ofthe multilingual subjects on the Implicit learning task was the result of betterautomated letter and pattern recognition skills.

In another experiment (Nayak, Hansen, Krueger, and McLaughlin (in press)),subjects were exposed to a limited subset of permissible strings from an artificiallinguistic system. The goal in this study was to determine whether subjects couldapply generalizations derived from the learned subset to novel strings and if so,what was the nature of these generalizations. In this experiment the linguisticsystem involved a phrase structure grammar in which constituents were definedby dependencies between words, as well as by regularities of substitution andequivalence (Morgan and Newport 1981).

No differences were found between multilingual and monolingual subjects invocabulary or rule learning. The 'experts' were not better than the 'novices' onthese tasks, but there were differences in how the two groups went about thetasks. In this experiment, half of the multilingual and the monolingual subjectswere told to memorize the material they were exposed to and half were told tolook for underlying rules. All subjects were asked at three points during thelearning phase to verbalize for another potential subject exactly what they weredoing and what strategies they were using.

Multilingual subjects were found to be more likely to use mnemonic devicesthan linguistic strategies in the memory condition, but in the rule-discoverycondition, both groups of subjects preferred linguistic strategies to mnemonicdevices, although the difference was statistically significant only for the multi-linguals (Table 3). In addition, multilingual subjects were found to use a widervariety of different strategies in the rule-discovery than in the memorycondition, and no such differences were found for the monolingual subjects.This suggests that one difference between more and less experienced languagelearners relates to flexibility in switching strategies. This is consistent with theresearch of Nation and McLaughlin (1986), who found that multilingualsubjects were able to avoid perseveration errors more than were other subjectsin their experiment. Similarly, Ramsey (1980) reported that multilingualsubjects demonstrated greater flexibilty in 'restructuring mental frameworks'than did monolingual subjects.

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Linguisticstrategies (b)Mnemonicdevices (c)

4.91

4.79

6.39

3.33

BARRY MCLAUGHLIN I 25

Table 3: Codings of subjects' verbalizations of strategies used inlearning phase (a)

Monolingual subjects Multilingual subjectsMemory Rule-discovery Memory Rule-discovery

1.97 6.58

7.47 2.94

From Nayak, Hansen, Krueger, and McLaughlin (in press).(a) Responses were coded by allotting 10 points per protocol to each of four

categories: structural, positional, verbal, and visual.(b) Combining scores for structural and positional categories.(c) Combining scores for verbal and visual categories.

Thus there is evidence to suggest that more expert language learners showgreater plasticity in restructuring their internal representations of the rulesgoverning linguistic input. This ability to exert flexible control over linguisticrepresentations and to shift strategies may result from 'learning to learn', in thesense that experience with a number of languages may make the individual moreaware of structural similarities and differences between languages and lessconstrained by specific learning strategies. More experienced learners maymore quickly step up to the metaprocedural level and weigh the strategies andtactics they are using.

In the Nayak et al. study, expert learners did not surpass novice learners inacquiring aspects of the linguistic system. This may have been because of limitedamount of time and exposure to the linguistic system. In the longer run, multi-lingual subjects would be expected to perform better on vocabulary and rulelearning, precisely because of their superior ability to shift strategies andrestructure their internal representations of the linguistic system.

CONCLUSIONTo summarize, the argument in this paper is that a complex cognitive skill, suchas acquiring a second language, involves a process whereby controlled,attention-demanding operations become automatic through practice. This isessentially learning through accretion, whereby an increasing number ofinformation chunks are compiled into an automated procedure. In addition,however, there are qualitative changes that occur as learners shift strategies andrestructure their internal representations of the target language.

In this view, practice can have two very different effects. It can lead toimprovement in performance as sub-skills become automated, but it is alsopossible for increased practice to lead to restructuring and attendant decre-ments in performance as learners reorganize their internal representationalframework. It seems that the effects of practice do not accrue directly or

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automatically to a skilled action, but rather cumulate as learners develop moreefficient procedures (Kolers and Duchnicky 1985). Performance may follow aU-shaped curve, declining as more complex internal representations replaceless complex ones, and increasing again as skill becomes expertise.

Such a cognitive psychological description of second language learningprovides, none the less, a partial account, and needs to be linked to linguistictheories of second language acquisition. By itself, for example, the cognitiveperspective cannot explain such linguistic constraints as are implied in marked-ness theory or that may result from linguistic universals. These specificallylinguistic considerations are not addressed by an approach that sees learning asecond language in terms of the acquisition of a complex cognitive skill.

(Received July 1988)

NOTEThis article is a revision of a paper presented at the Second Language Research Forum,

Honolulu, March 6, 1988. The author wishes to thank Jan Hulstijn and an anonymousreviewer for helpful comments.

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