Procedural/declarative learning (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

Procedural/declarative learning
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Language Learning Forum : General discussion

Bao
Diglot
Senior Member
Germany
tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5
Joined 5768 days ago
2256 posts - 4046 votes

Speaks: German*, English
Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin

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20 June 2009 at 1:27am | IP Logged

Coming from the discussion that isn't about Laoshu/Moses any more, I began to wonder renewedly:
Is there a difference between the declarative learning of grammar and the procedural learning of it? When learning it with your declarative memory system, what ways are there to learn to produce the grammar without relying on your semantic knowledge of it? Is it possible to generally learn the procedure first and the semantical rules only afterwards to reinforce it?
(I have been thinking about this for a while because I have a very hard time to learn to internalize target language grammar and sentence patterns that I have been understanding for quite some time and, well, I don't like having to climb up a wall if I could just take some steps to the side to find a gate.)

Google books search brought the scan of Mind & Context in Adult Second Language Acquisition and found this

Quote:

"The two systems [declarative and procedural memory systems] should interact both cooperatively and competitively in the acquisition and use of language. [...] Increased functionality in one system may depress the other and vice versa."(P. 149)
P. 150 onwards:
"People who learn a language at later ages, particularly after puberty, do not generally acquire the language to the level of proficiency attained by younger learners. However, late language learning does not seem to cause equal difficulties for lexical and grammatical functions. In L1, studies of language-deprived children have shown that late exposure to language results in an apparently irreversible inability to require aspects of grammar (particularly in morphology and syntax), whereas lexical acquisition remains relatively spared. In L2 the picture appears to be similar. A number of studies have shown that late L2 learning negatively affects the acquisition and/or processing of grammar while leaving lexical accretion [source] and lexical-conceptual procession relatively intact."
"At last during early adulthood [...] the acquisition of grammatical-procedural knowledge is expected to be more problematic than acquisition of lexical-declarative knowledge, as compared to language learning in young children. This may be due to one or more factors that directly or indirectly affect one or both brain systems, including decreased rule-abstraction abilities due to augmented working memory capacity, the attenuation of procedural memory, and the enhancement of declarative memory."

(A bit later comes the note that in older adults, declarative memory beings to decrease as well so the focus changes once again.)

In comparision to many participants of this forums I am an unexperienced language learner as my only fluent second language is English and it still needs a lot of work, so please help me with your experience!

Firsty I'd like to ask you about your knowledge about second language acquisition research. I'm new to this topic and only want to use it to facilitate my own studies, but I'd love book/paper recommendations.

Secondy, what do you think that model means for planning out one's studies?
What do you think it means for all the different learning methods you used so far?
(I'm thinking especially of shadowing which should directly target Broca's area and therefor accelerate the procedural learning.)

-Bao

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