A Brief Overview of Psycholinguistic Approaches to Second Language Acquisition

• Main Author: Isabella Wilson
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: KARE Publishing 2018-09-01
• Series: Applied Linguistics Research Journal
• Subjects: sla; psycholinguistic approaches; full access; no access; partial access
• Online Access: https://www.journalagent.com/z4/download_fulltext.asp?pdir=alrj&un=ALRJ-07108

With the emergence of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) as a field of study in the 1970s and the 1980s, various theories and approaches, although in many aspects contradictory, were put forward by scholars in the field. SLA is a field of inquiry that abounds in theories, while at the same time no single approach has adequately explained how language acquisition takes place. One reason mentioned in the literature might be that researchers and theoreticians interested in SLA issues have been trained in different disciplines, such as linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and neurolinguistics. This has led them to approach SLA from very different perspectives and treat all the variables involved in the learning process differently. Although the situation appears to be very confusing and frustrating, all the present theories, hypotheses, approaches, and models are all working toward the ultimate goal of a true theory of language acquisition. The present brief paper summarizes the major tenets of psycholinguistics approaches to SLA in general and specific hypotheses and suppositions addressed in the literature.