🌿 classical conditioning


✔️ a learning theory within the context of behaviorist psychology


✔️ Classical conditioning is a form of learning whereby a conditioned stimulus becomes associated with an unrelated unconditioned stimulus, in order to produce a behavioral response known as a conditioned response.


✔️ It was first demonstrated by the Russian psychologist Pavlov, who at the turn of the twentieth century conducted a series of experiments in which he trained a dog to salivate to the tone of a bell through a procedure that has come to be labeled classical conditioning

✔️ Drawing on Pavlov’s findings, Watson coined the term behaviorism. Watson contended that human behavior should be studied objectively, rejecting mentalistic notions of innateness and instinct. He adopted the classical conditioning theory as the explanation for all learning: by the process of conditioning, we build an array of stimulus-response connections, and more complex behaviors are learned by building up series or chains of responses.


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🌿 operant conditioning


✔️ also called instrumental conditioning

✔️ a learning theory proposed by Skinner within the context of behaviorist psychology

✔️ Operant conditioning refers to conditioning in which the organism (in this case, a human being) emits a response, or operant (a sentence or utterance), without necessarily observable stimuli; that operant is maintained (learned) by reinforcement (e.g., a positive verbal or nonverbal response from another person, getting what they want, receiving praise, getting people to interact with them)

✔️ If a child says ‘want milk’ and a parent gives the child some milk, the operant is reinforced and, over repeated instances, is conditioned.

✔️ According to Skinner, verbal behavior, like other behavior, is controlled by its consequences—the events or stimuli (i.e., the reinforcers) that follow a response and that tend to strengthen behavior or increase the probability of a recurrence of that response.

⬇️

🔹 When consequences are rewarding, behavior is maintained and is increased in strength and perhaps frequency.


🔹 When consequences are punishing, or when there is a total lack of reinforcement, the behavior is weakened and eventually extinguished.


✔️ According to Skinner, reinforcers are far stronger aspects of learning than is mere association of a prior stimulus with a following response, as in the classical conditioning model.


✔️ Skinner is called a neobehaviorist because he added a unique dimension to behavioristic psychology.

✔️ The classical conditioning of Pavlov was, according to Skinner, a highly specialized form of learning utilized mainly by animals and playing little part in human conditioning.

✔️ Skinner called Pavlovian conditioning respondent conditioning since it was concerned with respondent behavior—that is, behavior that is elicited by a preceding stimulus.


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🌿 prescriptive grammar

✔️ a grammar which states rules for what is considered the best or most correct usage.

✔️ many traditional grammars are of this kind.




🌿 descriptive grammar

✔️ a grammar which describes how a language is actually spoken and /or written, and does not state or prescribe how it ought to be spoken or written.



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🌿 meaningful learning


✔️ also called subsumption


✔️ the process of relating and anchoring new material to relevant established entities in cognitive structure

✔️ David Ausubel contended that learning takes place in the human organism through a meaningful process of relating new events or items to already existing cognitive concepts or propositions—hanging new items on existing cognitive pegs.


✔️ Meaning is not an implicit response, but a clearly articulated and precisely differentiated conscious experience that emerges when potentially meaningful signs, symbols, concepts, or propositions are related to and incorporated within a given individuals cognitive structure on a nonarbitrary and substantive basis.

✔️ It is this relatability that ,according to Ausubel, accounts for a number of phenomena: the acquisition of new meanings (knowledge), retention , the psychological organization of knowledge as a hierarchical structure, and the eventual occurrence of forgetting.


✔️ The cognitive theory of learning as put forth by Ausubel is perhaps best understood by contrasting rote learning and meaningful learning.

⬇️

Ausubel described rote learning as the process of acquiring material as discrete and relatively isolated entities that are relatable to cognitive structure only in an arbitrary and verbatim fashion, not permitting the establishment of meaningful relationships. That is, rote learning involves the mental storage of items having little or no association with existing cognitive structure.

⬇️

Most of us, for example, can learn a few necessary phone numbers and ZIP codes by rote without reference to cognitive hierarchical organization.


✔️ in meaningful learning, as new material enters the cognitive field, it interacts with, and is appropriately subsumed under, a more inclusive conceptual system ➡️ The very fact that material is subsumable, that is, relatable to stable elements in cognitive structure, accounts for its meaningfulness.


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🌿 attrition

✔️ the loss or forgetting of language skills


✔️language attrition refers to the gradual forgetting of a first or second language


✔️a common typology for research in attrition lists four categories of natural language attrition :

1⃣ attrition of first language skills (L1) in an L1 environment (e.g., ageing, dialectal loss)


2⃣ attrition of L1 skills in an L2 environment (e.g., fading L1 in migrant populations)


3⃣ attrition of L2 in an L1 environment (e.g., decline in school-learned L2) or decline in L2 following return to home country (e.g., returning expatriate workers or their children)


4⃣ attrition of L2 skills in an L2 environment (e.g., loss of L2 skills when ageing).


✔️ the degree and rate of language attrition may be affected by any or all of the following factors:

▪︎proficiency

▪︎age

▪️attitude

▪️motivation

▪️frequency of language use


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🌿 Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP)


✔️ a cognitive theory of L2 acquisition which is based on the notion that information is processed simultaneously at several levels of attention


✔️ as you read the words on this page, your brain is attending to letters, word juncture and meaning, syntactic relationships, textual discourse, as well as background experiences (schemata) that you bring to the text.


✔️ a child’s (or adult’s) linguistic performance may be the consequence of many levels of simultaneous neural interconnections rather than a serial process of one rule being applied, then another, then another, and so forth


✔️ The main properties of a PDP are as follows:

🔘 it is argued that multiple constraints govern language processing, with semantic and syntactic factors constantly interacting without it being possible to say that one set is primary

🔘 processing is activated by input which stimulates one or more units and, of course, their connections with other units.


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🌿 connectionism


✔️ connectionism is a theory which likens the brain to a computer that would consist of neural networks: complex clusters of links between information nodes.

⬇️

these links or connections become strengthened or weakened through activation or non-activation, respectively.


✔️ learning in this view occurs on the basis of associative processes, rather than the construction of abstract rules.

⬇️

in other words, the human mind is predisposed to look for associations between elements and create links between them. These links become stronger as these associations keep recurring, and they also become part of larger networks as connections between elements become more numerous


✔️ when applied to the learning of language, connectionism claims that learners are sensitive to regularities in the language input (i.e. the regular co-occurrence of particular language forms) and extract probabilistic patterns on the basis of these regularities. Learning occurs as these patterns become strengthened by repeated activation


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🌿 interaction hypothesis


✔️ the hypothesis that language acquisition requires or greatly benefits from interaction, communication and especially negotiation of meaning, which happens when interlocutors attempt to overcome problems in conveying their meaning, resulting in both additional input and useful feedback on the learner’s own production.




🌿 negotiation of meaning


✔️ an attempt made in conversation to clarify a lack of understanding

✔️ negotiation of meaning is triggered when there is a mismatch between a speaker’s intended message and what the listener interprets as the intended meaning

⬇️

the purpose of negotiation is to resolve the perceived mismatch, and such negotiations can occur in just about any kind of interaction.


✔️ negotiation of meaning is a term attributed to Michael Long and now widely used in the interactional research literature.



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