Abstract
Research on multilingualism and the acquisition of language(s) faces numerous challenges given its inherently interdisciplinary character. This discussion will focus on the notion of internal context, a concept that forcefully demonstrates the need for integrating linguistically-oriented research with cognitive research in general. Investigating the internal context of language processing centres on the ‘interpreted’ world inside individual minds together with all the cognitive mechanisms that shape it. It will be argued that explanations are required that must go well beyond accounts of the linguistic properties of individuals’ grammatical abilities and that, for this purpose, theoretical broad-based frameworks are needed that can act as ‘base camps’ facilitating explorations that venture beyond purely local domains and allowing findings from different research areas to be integrated within a shared perspective of how the mind works.
Keywords
I Introduction
This discussion will focus on cognitive aspects of linguistic ability, especially with reference to individuals who use more than one language. An argument will be made for a more structured interdisciplinary approach. An example to be used to support this argument will highlight our relative ignorance about the nature and online interactions of cognitive systems other than those that handle linguistic structure but which nevertheless influence both the representation and use of language. While there may be special mechanisms and systems for determining the properties of linguistic structure, what actually happens both in the on-line processing of language(s) and in the course of linguistic development is crucially influenced by other generic systems that, for (psycho)linguists, are not usually the focus of their investigations. These other systems form what will be called the ‘internal context’ of language processing (Truscott and Sharwood Smith, 2019). There are many signs that the time is ripe for a more coordinated approach to improving the situation. In recent years, the various separate research fields investigating language development and performance in second language (L2) learners and various other kinds of bilingual have been marked by a gradual process of coalescence: researchers frequently attend each other’s meetings and read each other’s publications. People working in these separate fields are consequently much more aware of, and can therefore profit from, one another’s research findings, hypotheses and theories. The need for wider perspectives has been recognized.
Exploring outside one’s chosen domain does not, however, constitute an entry into an ordered universe, given the number and diversity of approaches and research traditions. There is a notable absence of common frames of reference that are sufficiently elaborated and actively exploited to provide guidance. It is therefore well-nigh impossible for most individual investigators to plumb the depths of each field that seems relevant to them and there is no grand ‘theory of everything’ that condenses everything into manageable proportions. It is also time-consuming and difficult to assemble and maintain the right kind of interdisciplinary research group to sustain long-term project work. However large-scale theoretical frameworks can give individual researchers more than just a vague sense of a big picture. For this reason, they offer practical, realistic alternatives in the absence of a grand theory of human cognition. Broad scope frameworks of this type place research in different areas into some kind of shared perspective and provide something to work with. Most especially, they can facilitate deeper, richer and more satisfying explanations that contribute to what is currently understood about cognitive representation and processing in general. Since they are for use by researchers in different fields, they can support the sharing of information helping to develop a general perspective on what is currently understood about how the mind works and its relationships with the brain. Research findings within a given field can provide interesting contributions and challenges to aspects of the framework that affect work in other fields. Nothing drives home this point more effectively than the notion of ‘internal context’, to be discussed below. While there may be special mechanisms and systems for determining the properties of linguistic structure, what actually happens, both in the on-line processing of language(s) and in the course of linguistic development, is crucially influenced by other internal systems. A more than superficial understanding of what these are and how they operate becomes indispensable and requires contributions from disciplines outside linguistics.
1 Local frameworks
Without broad-based frameworks, the interpretation of results at the local level will typically focus on a restrictive and therefore manageable range of phenomena. Linguistic patterns in performance and development can be described and analysed and hypotheses about the data made about them. They can be loosely associated with observed events and background facts about the participants in the environment without knowing the internalizing mechanisms representing and processing them. Processing studies can use basic categories like words and syllables or adopt more complex categories and mechanisms from linguistic theory without feeling any need to adapt them for psycholinguistic purposes. Apart from the convenience of manageability, further investigations carried out at this level can continue on ad infinitum, giving researchers a satisfying sense of gradual progress. Perhaps there is also a seductive belief that an accumulation of many small explanations will, of themselves, produce future ‘big’ explanations, all this without any close study of what different researchers are currently saying about memory, perceptual processing, executive function, affect, and much more besides. A quick look at studies outside linguistics and language acquisition will surely provide a similar picture, producing examples of studies that have paid scant or no attention to what is going on in relevant areas of language research.
The question now arises as to what exactly constitutes a broad-based framework. The early adoption by a number of second language (L2) researchers of a generative linguistic perspective might be taken as an example of a framework adopted to guide specific aspects of L2 research (Flynn and Espinal, 1985; Schwartz, 1986; White, 1985). It was not the only theoretical linguistic perspective available at the time but it had the merit of coming from a highly active and well-developed area of research that was already rich in insights about linguistic structure and the nature of language itself. Adopting it resulted in an immediate increase in the linguistic sophistication of L2 grammatical analysis; furthermore, the formulation and testing of interesting new hypotheses concerning the properties of L2 grammars have continued to appear to this day.
The generative framework was not, within second language acquisition (SLA) research, ‘local’ but rather an import from theoretical linguistics and so might have qualified as being broad-based. It also had some wider implications about what language is, its biological status and the nature of language acquisition in general. Nonetheless, generative theory still leaves unexplained a great deal about language acquisition and processing. The classic Chomskian approach, now in its Minimalist phase, makes no claims about pragmatics and discourse or how language is processed in real time, although a theoretical account of abstract grammatical structure should provide an important resource for researchers in a field where explaining performance and development is the focus of investigation. At the same time it is not enough for a full explanation of how linguistic structures are realized in psycholinguistic terms and how they behave in real time contexts. Furthermore, for those concentrating on other, non-grammatical aspects of acquisition and processing, the fine details of this particular linguistic theory will not be especially helpful.
2 Internal context
The focus of this article is the notion of ‘internal context’ as applied to language development and performance (for a more extensive treatment of the topic, see Truscott and Sharwood Smith, 2019). It serves here as an example of a unifying concept which requires the integration of findings and theories from across a range of research domains including theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics and other branches of cognitive science.
The idea of context being internal, i.e. in the mind, shifts the focus from a sociological perspective to a cognitive one. It is not so much about states and events in the outside world as about interaction between representations that exist entirely within the mind’s internal environment.
Internal context is contrasted with the more familiar notion of ‘external context’, which is the presumed reality existing outside individuals and to which they have no direct access but must attempt to recreate from raw sensory data. These data must continually be processed via the different sense organs at their disposal for them to create or update properties of what might be called their ‘interpreted world’ (Truscott and Sharwood Smith, 2019). It is this internally represented world that individuals respond to when acquiring and using new languages. We can glean some information about what underlies their responses by examining their behaviour, observing the external context in which the behaviour took place, perhaps eliciting data about the participants’ background knowledge, emotions and attitudes and then drawing some conclusions on that basis. But that hardly obviates the need for an explicitly formulated model of the internal operations themselves. What is observed by researchers from the outside is clearly not the same as the individual’s own constructed reality which triggers all the various linguistic and non-linguistic responses that impact on their behaviour.
During language acquisition, for a new language to become established in an individual, representations within a developing syntactic system will interact continually with auditory, visual and other perceptual representations. Sensory input will be streaming in from the external context but the real action is within. As mentioned earlier, individuals do not respond directly to a world outside them: they respond to the world within, which – they find convenient to assume, and naively as it turns out – is a faithful recreation of what lies outside. Take fluent bilinguals, for example. Heritage language children travelling from home where the home language dominates to the school where the host language is spoken will be processing the external context in the usual manner. However, what directly triggers the particular language switch appropriate to the situation in which they find themselves will not be what is happening outside but rather the resulting activated representations in their interpreted world. Again, the real action takes place within and that is why it is so important not to take this internal world for granted: the internal mechanisms that create it must be the prime focus of investigation. We may easily observe them switching and where and when they switch or we may even elicit the switches experimentally, but this is done in a theoretical void or at least with an impoverished picture of what psychological mechanisms are at work.
To explain internal context further obviously requires the application of theoretical and experimental research in various areas of cognitive science This is a considerable challenge. In order to proceed, some way must be found of facilitating the search for broader-based explanations of those aspects of internal context which include all relevant aspects of the interpreted world and implicated cognitive mechanisms. With this aim in mind, and without further justification and detailed description, the Modular Cognition Framework (MCF) will be now used to elaborate further this notion of internal context (for more comprehensive accounts, see Sharwood Smith and Truscott, 2014, and, particularly, Truscott and Sharwood Smith, 2019).
II Internal context in the Modular Cognition Framework (MCF)
The MCF has been extensively described elsewhere but, for the purposes of the present discussion, it should be enough to know the following. It provides a theoretical framework for facilitating research into human cognition rooted in one well established perspective on how the mind works, namely as a network of collaborating but distinct functional systems (hence the use of the term ‘modular’). It was set up originally to investigate language acquisition as the MOGUL. 1 Although ‘language’ in its broadest sense involves many different systems in the mind, not just syntax, nor even grammar, certain defining properties of language do – in line with the basic assumptions of generative theory – arise from a dedicated system or systems that handle linguistic structure and nothing else. This allows us to distinguish the processing of linguistic structure from the processing taking place in the other systems which provide the internal context. This insistence on language-specific systems differs from other views on cognition, including some modular ones where language is seen as governed only by principles that hold for all of cognition without the need for any kind of language faculty (see, for example, Elman, 1995; Goldberg, 1995; Hernandez et al., 2005; O’Grady, 2005). Nevertheless, it still seemed important in order to find a bridge to link general principles of cognition with the principles proposed by generative linguists for explaining mental grammars.
In the MCF then, on-line processing drives not only language performance but also the creation, restructuring and accessibility of the linguistic representations themselves. The internal context of any kind of language processing comprises the factors that influence the outcome both of the properties of an individual’s linguistic representations themselves as determined by the core language system and also the way representations are actually deployed at any given moment. Figure 1 should give some idea of the interaction between the core language system and the surrounding internal context provided by other (unnamed) cognitive systems.
Sources producing the internal context.
The architecture of MCF must at least provide a provisional list of these different systems (or ‘modules’) and describe their internal operations and the ‘traffic rules’ defining their interactions. Even though life experience may continue to influence the ways in which the particular (non-linguistic) representations are organized, the contributing systems do not owe their existence to the external environment: their basic properties are part of our species-specific, biological inheritance. Both cats and humans have a visual system and an auditory system, for instance, but each one is specific to the particular species in question. In addition, only the perceptual representations such as the above mentioned two are derived from interaction with the outside world. Figure 1 provides a highly simplified picture. In particular, it does not signal a distinction that exists between two different types of internal context, that impact on linguistic performance and linguistic development, namely inherently internal context and outside-in context.
Inherently internal context originates not in the external environment but purely in the individual’s internal cognitive resources, primarily the conceptual system and also the affective system 2 the latter assigning positive and negative values to other cognitive representations and also being the source of emotions. Activated representations formed within and, in schemas, across these two systems produce the four basic components of inherently internal context, namely goals, emotion, value, and self (see extensive discussion in Truscott and Sharwood Smith, 2019: 81–97, 151–207, 222–23, 277–79). The heritage child travelling to school has certain goals in mind, a particular sense of self, emotions as well as positive and negative values at that moment attached to one or other of the languages they possess: all of this will affect the various activation levels or representations associated with their internal context and hence their behaviour, including which language they will use at their destination. The same goes for a child on a school bus soon to begin a foreign language class but the outcome at destination may not necessarily be the same. General explanations need to be supplemented by explicit, formal accounts of the representations and processing mechanisms involved. For example, what are the psychological mechanisms that attach particular positive or negative values to one language vis-à-vis another and how exactly are they attached? What exactly is the process by which these values can be altered when the context changes such that a different language system becomes relatively more activated and the current one consequently ceases to dominate and no longer determines online production? Without knowing more about these internal processes, any explanation will remain essentially incomplete.
Although the second type of internal context is managed by the sensory perceptual systems which themselves are inherently internal in the sense described above, their operations generate a type of internal context that does indeed originate in external reality. It consists in all the currently relevant, non-linguistic 3 aspects of the individual’s interpreted world which have been gained via interaction with the external environment: this is the current outside-in context. Figure 2 fills out what is displayed in the first figure by adding the currently co-activated non-linguistic representations (depicted as small white dots) to the various cognitive systems to which they belong. In the case of the heritage child in the example mentioned above, it will include the many conceptual and associated perceptual elements that underline the child’s representation of, respectively, the home and school environment, together containing their basic meaning and significance, in other words their perceptual constructions of what lies outside together with the concepts, values and emotions that the child has associated with them.
The two components of internal context.
The co-activation of the appropriate syntactic and phonological structures takes place alongside the co-activation of these various other non-linguistic representations which have already been created during the course of the child’s life time right up to the present moment. A broad-based framework should provide a working model of how different kinds of representation come to be associated with one another, how their online co-activation works, how positive and negative values can impact on processing activity, how different chains of association compete with one another, what internal processes cause certain environmental features to become more or less salient and so on and so forth. These will then help to determine amongst other things which particular linguistic (L1, L2, L3, etc.) system and structure will dominate over the others in any given situation (for further illustration and elaboration see, for example, Truscott and Sharwood Smith, 2017, 2019: 222–33).
To sum up, the combined internal context that powerfully influences the linguistic behaviour of any monolingual or bilingual/multilingual consists in a network of:
co-activated, non-linguistic representations.
the set of internal cognitive systems, perceptual or otherwise, responsible for creating, storing these representations.
The network of systems referred to in (2) is in effect the mind minus the core language system. The representations in (1) fall into two categories: some are the product of, notably, the conceptual and affective systems. Others are created via sensory processing and as such form part of the outside-in context.
III The implications of internal context for L2/multilingual theorizing
Most people will agree that we cannot, outside the domains of descriptive and theoretical linguistics at least, continue to examine linguistic patterns in behaviour as though they existed in a cognitive vacuum. For cognitive scientists of any persuasion, language and the rest of the mind are one way or another inextricably entwined. Investigators are already looking outside their immediate area of interest to incorporate what research theories and findings they can glean from other disciplines that are relevant to them: approaches to working memory and executive functions are typical areas of interest. This poses a challenge of Himalayan proportions. Without the time and effort this really requires, the temptation not to venture too far outside their field and continue as much as possible on safe ground by isolating oneself and dealing with very small manageable problems is overwhelming, especially given the academic pressure to publish quickly and prolifically. This means for an area such as language acquisition and bilingualism in general that to study behaviour and development (language acquisition or attrition) in real time there is a pressing need for a conceptual ‘base camp’. This would be one that provides a waystage for those venturing further beyond the local level and to see how their own research might fit into a broader cognitive perspective.
Even a fairly skeletal cognitive architecture that a broad-based framework can provide must nonetheless include some explicit guidance on how cognitive representations of any type are acquired and stored. This should be based on current scientific research in the relevant disciplines. It must similarly provide guidance on how representations are co-activated in given situations of language use. Explanations relating, for example, to memory and activation (already mentioned), as well as consciousness and attention have to reflect research done on these integral aspects of processing. It should be completely unacceptable, for example, to investigate language processing and development in real time without a clear theoretical notion of what memory might entail. The MCF does happen to have an explicit approach to all these aspects and, as a theoretical framework, it also relies on its architecture being fleshed out by work carried out in relevant domains.
IV The three levels with a health warning
Finally, cross-disciplinary investigation of language users acquiring and using languages requires respect for the following three levels of description and explanation (Sharwood Smith, 2017: 5ff; Truscott and Sharwood Smith, 2019: 18–19). Level 1 is the most abstract level, theoretical linguistics, because it is divorced from time and space considerations. Researchers are accordingly free to use temporal and spatial metaphors to describe relationships between linguistic categories without any implications for real time processing, the generative metaphor of ‘movement’ being a prime example.
Level 2 is the psychological or ‘mind’ level which, by explaining states and events, includes claims about temporal relationships, what happens before or after something else or simultaneously. Spatial metaphors are still free to use uninhibitedly: a ‘mental lexicon’ can be conceived of as a box or store, one for all languages or a box for each language. ‘Interfaces’ can link them in particular ways.
With Level 3, where neural descriptions and explanations are conducted, space also becomes an issue: states and events in the brain exist in three dimensions; for example, interfaces between different brain systems are physical pathways and brain locations will not straightforwardly reflect locations depicted in schematic cognitive architecture at the second level. 4 In other words, different theoretical accounts are also needed for the neural and the psychological levels, i.e. Levels 2 and 3.
The need for clearly distinguishing between levels holds for all researchers: neuroscientists at Level 3 are in equal need of a base camp to link their findings to current approaches in linguistic and psychological research. Perhaps, and especially amongst the public at large, there is a danger of excessive ‘neurophilia’, that is a tendency to couple exciting neuroscientific facts and findings with a theory-light approach to explanations at other levels of descriptions.
V Conclusions
This research note has centred on the need for interdisciplinary research in L2 acquisition and bilingualism and the challenges this involves. The notion of internal context was used as a demonstration of why looking at other areas of cognitive science is so important. An argument was made for exploiting broad-based theoretical frameworks that can act as a base-camp for exploring these other areas and a health warning was issued regarding the dangers of not respecting levels of explanation which, though relatable, must always be kept distinct. 5
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interest
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
