What is Fluency
Perspectives from Aphasia
February 25, 2014
Empirically we know that Stephen Hawking “speaks” very fluent English, while Sarah Scott does not.
Note: Sarah Scott is a young aphasic who once had but lost fluency following a stroke. Notice also how the conversion is fluent in the direction of comprehension, but not in production.
Fluency generally refers to a state of free-flowing conversion between linguistic expressions and thought, and vice versa.
A non-fluent speaker can still have very sophisticated thoughts, and often capable of expressing them in his or her native language, but cannot do so in the target language — and this is what we mean when we talk about a lack of fluency.
This is a qualitative definition. It’s also independent of output and its modality. That is what is meant when we say Stephen Hawking is very fluent in English.
Puppet Theatre
November 21, 2012
Vocabulary is only instrumental. They are linguistic puppets (like on Sesame Street) that enable us to carry on a narrative or show, so that the learner won’t be distracted by gigantic semantic holes on the shallow, surface level, so that their Acquisition Device can attend to the meaning conveyed by structural configuration, that is, on the deeper level, by semantic grammar outside of the lexicon.
“A rabbit ran by.”
The most meaning-rich elements above are the implied (past) Aux and “by”. The “vocabulary words” are just there to fill in some concrete objects so we have “actors” to carry out the show.
Consider:
He ran into a rabbit. (Chance encounter)
He ran over a rabbit. (Motor accident)
He ran over a bridge.
Naming vs. Remembering Names
December 23, 2012
anomia ≠ amnesia
What makes the difference?
How does memory transform into lexical knowledge (that is implicit and readily available for psycholinguistic processes)?
March 30, 2013
Can we skip vocabulary?
Let’s look at a particular example of anomia.
“HW” is a business executive who suffered a stroke. He is highly intelligent, articulate, and conversationally adept but finds it virtually impossible to retrieve nouns from his mental dictionary, though he can understand them. (Kathleen Baynes via Steven Pinker)
Here’s how he described the Cookie Theft picture:
“First of all this is falling down, just about, and is gonna fall down and they’re both getting something to eat … but the trouble is this is gonna let go and they’re both gonna fall down … I can’t see well enough but I believe that either she or will have some food that’s not good for you and she’s to get some for her, too … and that you get it there because they shouldn’t go up there and get it unless you tell them that they could have it. And so this is falling down and for sure there’s one they’re going to have for food and, and this didn’t come out right, the, uh, the stuff that’s uh, good for, it’s not good for you but it, but you love, um mum mum [smacks lips] … and that so they’ve … see that, I can’t see whether it’s in there or not … I think she’s saying, I want two or three, I want one, I think, I think so, and so, so she’s gonna get this one for sure it’s gonna fall down there or whatever, she’s gonna get that one and, and there, he’s gonna get one himself or more, it all depends with this when they fall down … and when it falls down there’s no problem, all they got to do is fix it and go right back up and get some more.”
The point is, he sounded somewhat fluent, even more so than what we think of as Broca’s aphasia patients.
August 12, 2013
It seems there are people who can read aloud and enunciate words like ‘quay’ or ‘colonel’ correctly without being able to recall their meanings… What is a word? Is it a printed string (of which there are many homographs), is it a lexical entry, is it an ontological concept?
What do we mean when we say someone knows a word, do we mean that he can access the word lexically, as in being able to connect to all those rules associated with that word, such as that ‘quay’ should sound like ‘key’? Are these rules what we should teach learners in SLA to remember? Is this the quantitative set of loading or burden for a ‘word’?
August 20, 2013
In any language with a sufficiently large corpus of colloquial use, there is a natural expression for a certain notion or idea, either by logical construction or by idiom…
The main goal for an SLA learner, is to build up a repertoire of easy access to these expressions, for all the ideas likely to be encountered.
Is this repertoire a combination of rule-based generation and lexicalised usage items? What kind of proportions do we have for this mixture?
