Foreign Language Input : Initial Processing

This book presents a comprehensive study of the starting point of SLA. With its focus on the language input that learners receive and what they do with this input, the study sheds light on questions, such as what knowledge is brought to the acquisition process and how learners use this knowledge to process new linguistic information. Foreign Language Input: Initial Processing presents the most comprehensive study to date of the starting point of second language acquisition. Its focus is on the language input that learners receive and what they actually do with this input. The empirical study detailed in the book follows a methodology in which all of the language input provided to the learners from the moment of first exposure is controlled, recorded and transcribed. This input is then quantitatively compared to the learners’ performance on language tasks administered at various time intervals up to 8 hours after first exposure. This in-depth analysis of the input and the learners’ performance sheds light on questions still unanswered in second language acquisition literature, such as what knowledge is brought to the acquisition process and how learners use this knowledge to process new linguistic information. "This book presents the most comprehensive study to date of the starting point of second language acquisition. Its focus is on the language input that learners receive and what they actually do with this input. The empirical study detailed in the book follows a methodology in which all of the language input provided to the learners from the moment of first exposure is controlled, recorded and transcribed. This input is then quantitatively compared to the learners' performance on language tasks administered at various time intervals up to eight hours after first exposure. This in-depth analysis of the input and the learners' performance sheds light on questions still unanswered in second language acquisition literature, such as what knowledge is brought to the acquisition process and how learners use this knowledge to process new linguistic information."--Jacket Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction Part 1: Theoretical Preliminaries Chapter 1. Input and Intake Revisited Chapter 2. First Exposure Studies Part 2: The Study Chapter 3. Polish-French Contrastive Analysis Chapter 4. Research Methodology Chapter 5. The Adult’s Available Knowledge at First Exposure to an Unknown Language Chapter 6. Case Studies: Two Learners with Similar Linguistic Profiles Chapter 7. Speech Perception Chapter 8. Speech Comprehension Chapter 9. Grammatical Analysis Chapter 10. Concluding Remarks Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 3 Appendix 4 Appendix 5 References Index