Table of Contents
1 Second Language Acquisition Facit Saints ('Takes a Leap') 1
1.1 Preview of the Volume: Second Language Acquisition in Adulthood is a Discontinuous Process 1
1.2 The Term 'Discontinuity' and its Meaning for SLA 3
1.3 The Core Idea of the Discontinuity Hypothesis 5
1.4 'Gemination' of the Same Twice-learned Items in a Learner's Competence 8
1.5 Second Language Acquisition is 'Quantized' 9
1.6 Falsifiability Criteria for the Discontinuity Hypothesis 11
1.7 Increasing Amount of Exposure to Input Cannot Explain All Developmental Transition States 15
1.8 Discontinuity is Neither Automatization Nor Restructuring 17
1.9 Discontinuity Does Not Mirror the Lexicon/Grammar Distinction 19
1.10 Discontinuity Operationalizes Two Different Kinds of L2 Grammar 20
1.11 Discontinuity Differs From Developmental Theories of 'Incrementalism' 22
1.12 Diagnostics of Discontinuity 24
1.13 Discontinuity and Individual Differences 28
1.14 Credits 31
1.15 Breakdown of the Volume 39
2 Discontinuity as Chunks Feed into Grammar 43
2.1 Chapter Preview: Frequency Takes the Floor 43
2.2 Three Aspects of the 'Frequency Factor' in Language Processing and Language Acquisition 44
2.3 Chunks, Not Formulas, Are the Building Blocks of SL 45
2.4 Chunks Feed into L2 Grammar 48
2.5 Chunks Feed into L2 Constructions 51
2.6 One Example of Gemination of TL Representation in L2 Italian 52
2.7 How Much Grammar Can Be Found in Chunks and Constructions? 58
2.8 Chunking (and SL) Operates on Sociolinguistic Variants as Well 60
2.9 To Sum Up: Some Language Properties Are Not a Property of Input 62
3 Discontinuity in the Maturing and in the Adapting Brain 64
3.1 Chapter Preview: Discontinuity Across a Learner's Age 64
3.2 Beyond the 'Fundamental Difference' Versus 'Full Access' Debate 66
3.3 Learning by Patches is Typical of Adult SLA 68
3.4 Discontinuity in Brain Maturation and Brain Adaptation 69
3.5 The Difference Between a 'Sensitive' and a 'Critical' Period for Language Acquisition 70
3.6 Discontinuity in the Maturing Brain 72
3.7 Lifelong Effects of the Early Acquisition of Additional Languages 78
3.8 Discontinuity and an Adult's Brain Adaptation 80
3.9 The Critical Period Hypothesis Revised 81
3.10 Specific Features of SLA in Adulthood 84
3.11 To Sum Up: The Balance Between Loss and Compensation in Late SLA 93
4 Discontinuity and the Neurecognition of Second Language 96
4.1 Chapter Preview: Discontinuity Fits a Divergence Model of L1-L2 Acquisition 96
4.2 The Notion of Convergence and the Single-net work Hypothesis 97
4.3 The Notion of Divergence and the Declarative/Procedural Model 98
4.4 The Declarative/Procedural Model 99
4.5 Problems with the DPM (and Possible Integrations) 108
4.6 Discontinuity and L2 Neurocognition: Experimental Studies 114
4.7 Studies Questioning the Developmental Relevance of the N400/P600 Dichotomy 123
4.8 What is Learned at Discrete Stages of Learning is Just Combinatorial Grammar 124
4.9 The N400-P600 Dichotomy Could Reveal L1-L2 Common Processing Strategies 128
4.10 A Different View of the N400-P600 'Biphasic Pattern': Neural Cues of Gemination in L2 Processing and Representations 129
4.11 To Sum Up: SL and GL Divide the Labor of SLA in Adulthood 131
5 Statistical Learning of a Second Language 135
5.1 Chapter Preview: What Parts of the L2 Are Affected by SL? 135
5.2 The Distinction Between Combinatorial and Non-combinatorial Grammar 136
5.3 Second Language Acquisition as a Form of Supervised SL 138
5.4 Did the SL Approach Change the Problem of Language Acquisition? 139
5.5 Is Probabilistic Information also Relevant to the Structural Properties of the Language? 140
5.6 Syntax that Can Be Learned Statistically (in a Miniature Artificial Grammar) 143
5.7 The Potential Contribution of SL for the Acquisition of L2 Syntax 146
5.8 On Syntax as 'Structural Integration': P600 Effects also Signal Identical Violations in Non-linguistic Domains 151
5.9 Are the Patterns that Statistical Learners Extract from the Input Actually 'Syntactic Structures'? 154
5.10 Adjacency, Non-adjacency and SL 158
5.11 Non-adjacent Dependencies in SL Correspond to What We Have Previously Labeled as Combinatorial Grammar 161
5.12 Neural Correlates of the Processing of Supra-regular (Phrase-Structures) Versus Regular (Finite State) Grammars 166
5.13 What 'L2 Chunks Feed Into Grammar' Means in the Perspective of SL 172
5.14 To Sum Up: The Distinctive Features of SL and Discontinuity in SLA 175
6 Parts of 12 Grammar That Resist Statistical Learning 178
6.1 Chapter Preview: Two Kinds of Grammar, Two Kinds of Learning 178
6.2 The Discontinuity from Statistical 'Counting' to Grammatical 'Computation' 179
6.3 The Switch Between Concatenation and 'External Merge' 180
6.4 Discontinuity and Downstream, Top-down L2 Processing 188
6.5 The Benefits of Frequency Do Not Extend to Displaced Items ('Internal Merge') and to Empty Categories 190
6.6 There are Parts of the Second Language that Cannot Be Learned like a Song 196
6.7 Non-combinatorial Grammar and Non-adjacency of Items in a Sentence 197
6.8 Non-combinatorial Grammar and Long-distance Dependencies: The Shallow Structure Hypothesis 193
6.9 Non-combinatorial Grammar at the Interfaces 204
6.10 Non-combinatorial Grammar and Uninterpretable Features 213
6.11 Non-combinatorial Grammar and Functional Morphology: The 'Bottleneck' Hypothesis 215
6.12 Is Non-combinatorial Grammar Important for SLA? 216
6.13 To Sum Up: Whether Something Can Be Learned or Not Depends on How it Can Be Learned 218
Conclusions 220
References 225
Index 251
