Becoming Fluent

by Richard M Roberts

  But even with kanji, teachers can reduce the cognitive load of this task by showing students how to break apart the character into its component parts, which have somewhat consistent meanings across the characters in which they are found. This is the technique advocated by James Heisig in his book Remembering the Kanji. For example, the kanji for fortune telling is made up of two elements: “mouth” and “divining rod.”15 This is an example of managing the cognitive load that is specific to the language itself. To use Miller’s terminology, the kanji for fortune telling has been transformed from five individual brush strokes into only two chunks, thereby increasing the capacity of short-term, or working, memory.

  Cognitive Overload from Factors External to Language

  Cognitive overload also occurs when the way the material is presented imposes too great a demand on working memory. With any instructional technique, therefore, it is crucial to consider how each aspect of the technique itself requires something of working memory, and then reduce or eliminate those parts of the task that impose too high a cognitive demand. External factors that increase cognitive load include time constraints, motivation, distractions, and other situational factors that are not part of the language itself.

  How much or how little cognitive load can be imposed before cognitive overload results follows a pattern referred to as the Yerkes–Dodson law. The Yerkes–Dodson law describes how, for easily accomplished tasks, adding cognitive load (or what we could also call arousal or pressure) is actually helpful in accomplishing a task. In other words, performance on easy tasks actually improves when external factors are imposed.16

  For example, imagine that you are driving on Interstate 80 in Nebraska on a beautiful spring day. The road is dry, smooth, and there is very little traffic. What do you do? If you are like many people, you are likely to add cognitive load to this relatively easy task by singing along with the radio, or talking to your companion, or listening to a book on tape. In fact, because the task is so easy, if you didn’t add any external complexity to it, your mind would start to wander and you could possibly fall asleep at the wheel. Therefore, adding extrinsic cognitive load is crucial to helping you accomplish the task of driving effectively.

  But imagine now that traffic has suddenly gotten heavier, the sky has darkened, and rain is coming down so heavily you can hardly see the road. What do you do? The first thing you might do is to turn off the radio or tell your companion to be quiet—even though neither of those actions will make the rain stop or cause the traffic to clear up. But you do it anyway because the task of driving the car has just gotten more difficult, so you need to get rid of any unnecessary demands on your attention. If the radio kept blaring and your friend kept talking you might go into a state of cognitive overload with potentially disastrous results.

  Here’s another example. In the theater it is a generally held superstition that if a dress rehearsal is great, then the actual performance will be awful. But if a dress rehearsal is awful, then the performance will be great. Why? According to the Yerkes–Dodson law, if the actors and stagehands are very well prepared, then the dress rehearsal isn’t stimulating and without the added arousal of an audience, they don’t really try hard. The next night when the audience is in attendance, the added external arousal is exciting and they perform quite well. In other words, if you know something well you do better in front of a group than you do practicing alone.

  Alternatively, if the dress rehearsal goes well without an audience, then the presence of an audience might add too much pressure, and cognitive overload may be the result. Therefore, if you don’t know something well, you perform it better alone than you do in front of a group.

  The same is true for language learning. As an adult language learner, it is important for you to control how much cognitive load you can tolerate before reaching a state of cognitive overload. If a task is easy for you, then applying it in ways that that add complexity will help you perform better. If the task is difficult, then it is important that you find ways to reduce or eliminate anything that adds unnecessary cognitive demands to the task.

  Factors that increase cognitive load are often built into language-learning tasks on purpose to ensure mastery of the material. For example, teachers may give timed tests because the added pressure of a time limit will show how much of the students’ language ability has become automatic. Timed tests can actually enhance the performance of speakers with a high level of proficiency, but they can impair the performance for those whose linguistic abilities are still shaky. Therefore, the addition of cognitive load cannot be said to be either good or bad. How a person responds to the additional cognitive demands placed on a task depends on the task itself, the cognitive strategy used to perform the task, and the individual’s level of mastery.17

  Interpersonal factors also place burdens on available cognitive resources. Even something as routine as being polite requires extra mental processing that can unintentionally cause confusion or misunderstanding.18 In a similar way, if you are an outgoing person who is always looking for opportunities to meet new people, then a scavenger hunt in which you approach strangers in a shopping center and engage them in conversation will seem easy and fun, and therefore, you will not feel cognitively overloaded when you add to the complexity of the task by trying to engage them in your target language. However, if this is exactly the kind of activity you despise, then the added stress (e.g., overcoming one’s natural shyness, or feeling embarrassed) could send you into a state of cognitive overload. In this case, the unnecessary external element (a scavenger hunt where you are forced to interact with unsuspecting strangers) artificially imposes such a huge emotional load on the linguistic task (which is, in fact, the main task) that it overloads the person’s working memory capacity and very little learning will actually take place.

  When designing or evaluating language learning tasks, it is important to think about the cognitive load required for the task. Try to separate the cognitive demands into those that are intrinsic to the language itself from those that are being imposed externally. No specific language learning task is right or wrong in terms of cognitive load—but some will impose higher external cognitive demands on working memory than others, which may, depending on the person, enhance the learning experience or create a state of cognitive overload.

  The Time-Traveling Intruder

  If you’ve had to change your telephone number in the recent past, you may have experienced difficulties in remembering it at first. As you attempted to recall the sequence to answer a friend’s query, your old phone number may have popped unbidden into your mind, and it may have taken some effort to recall your new number. This annoying phenomenon is a well-understood principle of memory called proactive interference. The idea is that old learning can get in the way of, and interfere with, your ability to recall things you’ve learned more recently. The more similar the old and new learning, the more likely it is that you will experience interference.19

  Numerous laboratory studies have demonstrated the power of proactive interference—and most such studies are conducted on college-age students, so even younger adults have trouble with this. In a typical experiment, participants are asked to memorize a list of similar items. This list (we’ll call it list A) might consist of words like lion, giraffe, and elephant. After learning list A, participants are asked to memorize a second list (list B), which contains items like zebra, antelope, and gazelle. After learning list B, participants are given another unrelated task, and after a few moments are asked to recall list B. As you might imagine, this can be a challenging task, because of the similarities of the words on both lists (animals that inhabit the savannas of Africa). Just like the old telephone number, the animals from list A intrude into the participants’ awareness, making it more difficult for them to recall the animals from list B. Now imagine what might happen if participants are asked to learn list C, which also contains the names of African animals. The results aren’t pretty!

  Interestingly, interf
erence effects can occur in reverse as well. If someone asks you for your current phone number, you can probably supply it readily enough. But if they were also to ask you to recall your previous phone number, you might experience some difficulty. In this case, the new learning—your current phone number—is causing problems for the old learning—the previous number. This is referred to as retroactive interference. Like a character in a bad science fiction movie, the new learning can travel back in time and make life difficult for information that you’ve learned previously.

  As a foreign language learner, it’s important to understand what causes interference effects, and what to do when you experience them. If you’ve been studying a list of Spanish nouns and find yourself making many mistakes as you attempt to recall them, you’re likely to feel frustration. Instead of giving up, however, you would be well advised to shift your study to a different set of words, like adjectives or verbs, or to a different task entirely, such as grammar. When you return to the list of nouns, you may find that your recall has improved. Researchers call this improved performance in memory after a change in study material release from proactive interference. This suggests that it is wise to study different materials over shorter periods of time rather than one type of material over a longer period. For example, rather than study vocabulary for thirty minutes and then grammar for thirty minutes, it may better to alternate them every fifteen minutes and then take a break.

  It may seem perverse that the knowledge you’ve taken pains to acquire in the past can sabotage your efforts to learn new material in the present or the future. However, that’s viewing the glass as half empty. The fact that you experience interference means that you already possess a great deal of information in long-term memory. You’re not just an adult language learner—you’re a knowledgeable adult language learner. The trick is to make this prior learning work for you, not against you. First of all, be thankful that you have this prior knowledge and be glad that all of it hasn’t been forgotten. Over time, information stored in long-term memory does fade, but no matter how much you may feel you have forgotten, as we mentioned earlier in this chapter, relearning is always faster than learning. If you studied Spanish in high school and twenty years later you decide to start studying Spanish again, you clearly have an advantage over the person who has never studied it, even if you don’t think you do.

  But let’s say that you’d like to study a different language now. At first, you might experience some mild proactive interference. For example, the previously learned Spanish might interfere with the new language. As you continue to study the new language, acquiring more and more linguistic information, cultural knowledge and contextual cues, previously learned information will interfere less and less. Since you cannot actively forget information the same way you actively learn it, interference is normal and should be expected. Therefore, rather than berate yourself for the interference, leverage your metacognitive skills to exploit your previous knowledge and experience in service of learning the new language. For example, if you previously studied Spanish, but now you are studying Italian, apply what you know about Romance languages in general to Italian when and where appropriate. If you are now studying Chinese, there will be fewer ways to search out and benefit from such linguistic commonalities; however, because the languages themselves are so different, there is likely to be less interference anyway.

  Because we are constantly learning new information throughout our lives, it is not surprising that older adults experience more interference on memory tasks than younger adults. The fact that it happens more frequently as we age merely means we’ve learned a lot more information. But even here, there is good news. Lisa Emery, Sandra Hale, and Joel Myerson found the expected increase in interference for older adults, but they also demonstrated that both younger and older adults showed complete release from proactive interference.20 So when you begin to make more errors when studying vocabulary or grammar, just keep calm and carry on—but with a different task.

  8

  … And Making Memories Work for You

  Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me

  One well-studied memory phenomenon is the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state. This refers to situations in which you know you know something, and can almost retrieve it, but for some reason, you can’t quite produce it. The researchers Roger Brown and David McNeill likened a TOT state to “mild torment, something like the brink of a sneeze.”1 You’ve undoubtedly had to endure conversations with friends in which they verbally flail in their attempts to produce something like the name of an actor. “You know, he was the guy who was in those Superman movies back in the Seventies … and then he was thrown from a horse, and was paralyzed, and then later he created a research foundation … you know, he was really tall and good looking … what was his name??” (Just in case we’ve caused a TOT state for you, this example refers to Christopher Reeve.)

  TOT states have received considerable attention from cognitive scientists because of their paradoxical nature: how is it possible to recall so much information about someone, but not the name? Fortunately, it’s fairly easy to cause research participants to experience TOT states in the lab. Brown and McNeill discovered that if they gave their subjects dictionary definitions of rare or unusual words, they could frequently trigger the TOT state.

  Before describing Brown and McNeill’s results, let’s see if we can put you in such a state. Below are a series of definitions based on their original items. After reading each one, assess what you’re experiencing. There are three possibilities:

  (a) You have no idea what’s being described, and no feeling of familiarity. Remember that these are rare and unusual terms, so this may happen rather frequently. Just move on to the next item.

  (b) You know that you know the object or concept being described, and can state its name out loud. In this case, you can congratulate yourself on your formidable vocabulary, and move on to the next item.

  (c) You think that you might know the word, but you can’t articulate it. If you find yourself in this state, we’d like you to guess (1) whether the word you can’t remember is long or short; (2) how many syllables it has; and (3) what the first letter of the word might be. Even if you’re not at all certain, just guess.

  Ready? Here’s the first definition (you’ll find the answers at the end of this section). If you’re in a TOT state, be sure to write down your guesses about length, number of syllables, and first letter.

  1.What is the name of the small boat seen in the rivers and harbors of Asia, propelled by oars and typically with a roof covered in woven mats?

  2.What is the name for the semicircular, vaulted area at one end of a church?

  3.What is term for showing favor in business or politics for members of one’s own family?

  4.What is the name of the staff encircled by two snakes used as the symbol of the medical profession?

  5.What is the term for getting money or favors through intimidation or the threat of violence?

  6.What is the term for assembling people for a common purpose, such as a meeting or a conference?

  7.What is another name for a stamp collector?

  8.What is the term for displaying excessive flattery or an ingratiating demeanor?

  9.What is the name of the navigational instrument used for measuring angular distances, especially the sun, moon, and stars at sea?

  10.What is the name of the cavity at the end of a bird’s digestive track?

  We’re hoping that you experienced a TOT state after reading one or more of these definitions. If you did, were you able to come up with information about the word itself?

  Brown and McNeill provided Harvard undergraduates with such definitions, and found that they reported TOT states about 13 percent of the time. When the results were analyzed, Brown and McNeill found that the participants performed well above chance with regard to the three questions. Short words were believed to be short, the estimated length in syllables was frequently correctly recalled, and on man
y occasions, the first letter of the word was produced.

  Even the errors from this study are of interest. For example, some participants produced the word sexton for the next to last definition above. “Sexton” (grave digger) is far removed from the concept of a navigational instrument, but identical to sextant in terms of length and number of syllables. They also share the same sounds. These observations provided researchers with valuable clues about the organization of long-term memory: it seems that words that sound alike may be stored near each other in long-term memory, and that certain attributes of concepts may be available even when others are not.

  The adult foreign language learner can take away a number of important messages from this research. First, it should be comforting to realize that even Harvard undergraduates experience tip-of-the-tongue states, so you shouldn’t get frustrated when this happens to you. In fact, so-called diary studies, in which participants are asked to record their TOT experiences, have found that these states increase from about once a week for younger adults to about once a day for older adults.2

  Once again, these discoveries can be viewed negatively or positively, depending on one’s perspective. It certainly is the case that such episodes become more frequent across the lifespan, but their presence should not be taken as evidence of a wholesale decline in memory. Although having a lot of knowledge does not seem to cause more TOT states, it should be reassuring, nevertheless, to know that when TOT states do occur, it’s because the sought-after word is in fact present in memory, even if it can’t be retrieved right away.3 Such experiences often occur right before the word enters into conscious awareness, so if you believe that the term is on the “tip of your tongue,” it really might be—you just need to be patient enough to allow it to make its appearance.