Becoming Fluent

by Richard M Roberts

  7On ambiguous figurative language not being rare, again see Pollio et al., Psychology and the Poetics of Growth. On the shared root of the English to be and the Sanskrit to breathe, see Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976).

  8For estimates on how many different figures of speech there are, see, e.g., Alex Preminger, and T. V. F. Brogan, eds., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (New York: MJF Books, 1993). On Americans as greatly prone to exaggeration, see, e.g., “American Exaggerations,” New York Times, August 4, 1854, p. 4, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1854/08/04/88135952.html. For Queen Elizabeth II’s famously understated remark, see Caroline Davies, “How the Royal Family Bounced Back from Its ‘Annus Horribilis,’” Guardian, May 24, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/may/24/royal-family-bounced-back-annus-horribilis.

  9On how metaphors become less malleable over time, see Anne Cutler, “Idioms: The Colder the Older,” Linguistic Inquiry 13 (1982): 317–320. On the novelty of an idiomatic expression upon one’s first encounter with it, see Jeannette Littlemore, “Metaphoric Intelligence and Foreign Language Learning,” Humanising Language Teaching 3 (2) (2001), http://www.hltmag.co.uk/mar01/mart1.htm.

  10On metaphoric intelligence, see Littlemore, “Metaphoric Intelligence and Foreign Language Learning.”

  11On using language to maintain interpersonal relationships, see Gabriele Kasper, Can Pragmatic Competence Be Taught? (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, Second Language Teaching & Curriculum Center, 1997), http://www.nflrc.hawaii.edu/NetWorks/NW06/.

  12On the difficulty of translating interpersonal abilities between cultures, see, e.g., Raymond Carroll, Cultural Misunderstandings: The French-American Experience (University of Chicago Press, 1988). On highcontext versus low-context cultures, see Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1976).

  13On Japan, China, and Korea as high-context cultures, see, e.g., Elizabeth Würtz, “Intercultural Communication on Websites: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Websites from High-Context Cultures and Low-Context Cultures,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11 (1) (2006): 274–299. On leaving things unsaid in high-context cultures, see again Hall, Beyond Culture.

  14On Germany, Norway, and the United States as low-context cultures, see again Würtz, “Intercultural Communication on Websites.” On schizophrenics and their partners’ common ground, see Roberts and Kreuz, “Nonstandard Discourse and Its Coherence.”

  15On people in Turkey as more extroverted than people in Japan, see C. Ashley Fulmer, Michele J. Gelfand, Arie W. Kruglanski, Chu Kim-Prieto, Ed Diener, Antonio Pierro, and E. Tory Higgins, “On “Feeling Right” in Cultural Contexts: How Person-Culture Match Affects Self- Esteem and Subjective Well-Being,” Psychological Science 21 (11) (2010): 1563–1569.

  16On taking into account your own unique relationship to the language and culture you want to learn, see Kasper, Can Pragmatic Competence Be Taught?

  17On the uncanny valley, see M. Mori, “The Uncanny Valley,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine 19 (2) (1970): 98–100.

  5  Language and Perception

  1On Salthouse’s general slowing hypothesis, see Timothy A. Salthouse, “The Processing-Speed Theory of Adult Age Differences in Cognition,” Psychological Review 103 (3) (1996): 403–428.

  2On the pauses in conversations between native speakers, see Susan Ervin-Tripp, “Children’s Verbal Turn-Taking,” in Developmental Pragmatics, ed. Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin, 391–414 (New York: Academic Press, 1979). On the extensive cognitive processing that goes into such pauses, see Willem J. M. Levelt, Speaking: From Intention to Articulation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).

  3On the “filled pause,” see Geoffrey Beattie, “The Dynamics of Interruption and the Filled Pause,” British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 16 (3) (1977): 283–284.

  4On the efficacy of “train your brain” practices at improving other abilities, see Adrian M. Owen, Adam Hampshire, Jessica A. Grahn, Robert Stenton, Said Dajani, Alistair S. Burns, Robert J. Howard, and Clive G. Ballard, “Putting Brain Training to the Test,” Nature 465 (2010): 775–778.

  5For research on bilinguals regarding the cognitive benefits of foreign language learning, see Ellen Bialystok, Fergus I. M. Craik, David W. Green, and Tamar H. Gollan, “Bilingual Minds,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 10 (3) (2009): 89–129.

  6For estimates on the relative numbers of monolinguals, bilinguals, and multilinguals, see G. Richard Tucker, “A Global Perspective on Bilingualism and Bilingual Education,” Center for Applied Linguistics, 1999, http://www.cal.org/resource-center/briefs-digests/digests.

  7For research on the cognitive abilities of those who can speak more than one language, see Bialystok et al., “Bilingual Minds.” For research on the performance of bilinguals on tests of selective attention and multitasking, see Ellen Bialystok and Fergus I. M. Craik, “Cognitive and Linguistic Processing in the Bilingual Mind,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 19 (1) (2010): 19–23. On bilinguals’ performance on the Stroop Test, see Ellen Bialystok, “Reshaping the Mind: The Benefits of Bilingualism,” Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology 65 (4)(2011): 229–235.

  8For the explanation of bilinguals being better at multitasking in terms of inhibiting one language, see Ellen Bialystok, Fergus I. M. Craik, and Gigi Luk, “Bilingualism: Consequences for Mind and Brain,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16 (4) (2012): 240–250. For bilinguals’ superior performance on concept formation tasks, following complex instructions, and switching to new instructions, see Ellen Bialystok and Michelle M. Martin, “Attention and Inhibition in Bilingual Children: Evidence from the Dimensional Change Card Sort Task,” Developmental Science 7 (3) (2004): 325–339; Elizabeth Peal and Wallace C. Lambert, “The Relations of Bilingualism to Intelligence,” Psychological Monographs: General and Applied 76 (27) (1962): 1–23. On the cognitive and linguistic advantages of bilingualism outweighing negative aspects, see Bialystok and Craik, “Cognitive and Linguistic Processing in the Bilingual Mind.”

  9For the details of the research into the incidence of Alzheimer’s in bilinguals compared to monolinguals, see Ellen Bialystok, Fergus I. M. Craik, and Morris Freedman, “Bilingualism as a Protection against the Onset of Symptoms of Dementia,” Neuropsychologia 45 (2) (2007): 459–464.

  10For the details of the study in India on the incidence of Alzheimer’s in bilinguals, see Suvarna Alladi, Thomas H. Bak, Vasanta Duggirala, Bapiraju Surampudi, Mekala Shailaja, Anuj Kumar Shukla, Jaydip Ray Chaudhuri, and Subhash Kaul, “Bilingualism Delays Age at Onset of Dementia, Independent of Education and Immigration Status,” Neurology 81 (22) (2013): 1938–1944. For the positive effects of bilingualism even when the person acquired the language in adulthood, see Thomas H. Bak, Jack J. Nissan, Michael M. Allerhand, and Ian J. Deary, “Does Bilingualism Influence Cognitive Aging?” Annals of Neurology 75 (6) (2014): 959–963. For the suggestion that the positive benefits of bilingualism only accrue to those who use both languages all the time, see Claudia Dreifus, “The Bilingual Advantage,” New York Times, May 30, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/science/31conversation.html.

  11On the claim that further research is needed to determine what caused the differences in age of onset between monolinguals and bilinguals, see Judith F. Kroll, “The Consequences of Bilingualism for the Mind and the Brain,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 10 (3) (2009): i–ii.

  12On the issue of whether being socially active prevents dementia, or whether people who don’t have dementia are more likely to be socially active, see Hui-Xin Wang, Anita Karp, Bengt Winblad, and Laura Fratiglioni, “Late-Life Engagement in Social and Leisure Activities Is Associated with a Decreased Risk of Dementia: A Longitudinal Study from the Kungsholmen Project,” American Journal of Epidemiology 155 (12) (2002): 1081–1087.

  13On the spontaneous rate of speech in English and Japanese, see Harry Osser and Frederick Peng, “A Cro
ss Cultural Study of Speech Rate,” Language and Speech 7 (2) (1964): 120–125.

  14For research on the phenomenon of generalization and transfer, see, e.g., Ann R. Bradlow and Tessa Bent, “Perceptual Adaptation to Non-Native Speech,” Cognition 106 (2) (2008): 707–729.

  15For research into the generalization effect, see Cynthia G. Clopper and David B. Pisoni, “Some Acoustic Cues for the Perceptual Categorization of American English Regional Dialects,” Journal of Phonetics 32 (1) (2004): 111–140.

  16For the details of Flege and his colleagues’ study on age constraints on second-language learning, see James Emil Flege, Grace H. Yeni-Komshian, and Serena Liu, “Age Constraints on Second-Language Acquisition,” Journal of Memory and Language 41 (1) (1999): 78–104.

  17For details on the research on Italians who immigrated to the United States, see Ian R. A. Mackay, James E. Flege, and Satomi Imai, “Evaluating the Effects of Chronological Age and Sentence Duration on Degree of Perceived Foreign Accent,” Applied Psycholinguistics 27 (2) (2006): 157–183.

  18For the quote from Meryl Streep, see Benjamin Wood, “The Iron Lady: Meryl Streep Says Accents Are the Easiest Thing She Does,” Entertainment Weekly, December 7, 2011, http://insidemovies.ew.com/2011/12/07/meryl-streep-iron-lady-panel/.

  6  Cognition from Top to Bottom

  1On the McGurk effect, see Harry McGurk and John MacDonald, “Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices,” Nature 264 (1976): 746–748.

  2For Lin’s Unspeakableness project, see http://uniquelang.peiyinglin.net.

  3On the question of the extent to which language influences thought, see, e.g., Benjamin Lee Whorf and Stuart Chase, Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. John B. Carroll (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1956). On treating concepts from the native language as prototypes for concepts in the new language, see Gilbert A. Jarvis, “Psychological Processes in Foreign and Second Language Learning,” in Critical Issues in Foreign Language Instruction, ed. Ellen S. Silber, 29–42, Garland Reference Library of Social Science, Volume 459 (New York: Routledge, 1991).

  4On the topic of how thinking in a native or a foreign language influences problem solving, see Boaz Keysar, Sayuri L. Hayakawa, and Sun Gyu An, “The Foreign-Language Effect: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases,” Psychological Science 23 (6) (2012): 661–668. On speaking a nonnative language giving the speaker distance from a moral problem, see Boaz Keysar and Albert Costa, “Our Moral Tongue,” New York Times, June 20, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/opinion/sunday/moral-judgments-depend-on-what-language-we-are-speaking.html. On using one’s native language versus a nonnative language to remember autobiographical events and its effect on the arousal of emotion, see Viorica Marian and Margarita Kaushanskaya, “Self-Construal and Emotion in Bicultural Bilinguals,” Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2) (2004): 190–201.

  5For the estimate that a native college-educated speaker of English knows only about 17,000 words, see Eugene B. Zechmeister, Andrea M. Chronis, William L. Cull, Catherine A. D’Anna, and Noreen A. Healy, “Growth of a Functionally Important Lexicon,” Journal of Literacy Research 27 (2) (1995): 201–212.

  6On the use of idiolect to determine the identity of the Unabomber, see James R. Fitzgerald, “Using a Forensic Linguistic Approach to Track the Unabomber,” in Profilers: Leading Investigators Take You Inside the Criminal Mind, ed. John H. Campbell, 193–222 (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010); on its use to identify the authors of the Federalist Papers, see Frederick Mosteller and David L. Wallace, “Inference in an Authorship Problem: A Comparative Study of Discrimination Methods Applied to the Authorship of the Disputed Federalist Papers,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 58, (302) (1963): 275–309; and on its use to identify the author of Primary Colors, see Donald W. Foster, Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous (New York: Henry Holt, 2000).

  7For Ogden’s proposal of Basic English, see Charles Kay Ogden, Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar (London: Paul Treber, 1944).

  8On using the word order from your native language in your target language as an instance of negative transfer, see David N. Perkins and Gavriel Salomon, “Transfer of Learning,” in The International Encyclopedia of Education, 2nd ed., vol. 11, ed. Torsten Husen and T. Neville Postlethwaite, 6452–6457 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1992).

  9On high-road and low-road transfer as the two mechanisms adult language learners can use to facilitate positive transfer, see Gavriel Salomon and David N. Perkins, “Rocky Roads to Transfer: Rethinking Mechanisms of a Neglected Phenomenon,” Educational Psychologist 24 (2) (1989): 113–142. On the example of driving a rental truck after driving a car as one of low-road transfer, see Perkins and Salomon, “Transfer of Learning.”

  10For these examples of metaphors, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 44–45.

  11For research on expressions of heartbreak, see Kathrin Abe, Nadja Kesper, and Matthias Warich, “Domain Mappings—General Results,” in Cross-Cultural Metaphors: Investigating Domain Mappings across Cultures, ed. Marcus Callies and Rüdiger Zimmerman, 29–40 (Marburg: Philipps-Universität, 2002).

  12For his work on idioms, see Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); these examples come from p. 9.

  13On thinking about the conceptual mappings of metaphors and idioms in your target language as an aid to organization and learning, see, e.g., Andrew Ortony, “Why Metaphors Are Necessary and Not Just Nice,” Educational Theory 25 (1) (1975): 45–53; Hugh G. Petrie and Rebecca S. Oshlag, “Metaphor and Learning,” in Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed., ed. Andrew Ortony, 579–609 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

  7  Making Memories …

  1For Miller’s “the magical number seven, plus or minus two,” see George A. Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information,” Psychological Review 63 (2) (1956): 81–97.

  2On the steady decline of memory span after the age of twenty, see Jacques Grégoire and Martial Van der Linden, “Effect of Age on Forward and Backward Digit Spans,” Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition 4 (2) (1997): 140–149.

  3“The adult learns best not by rote …”: Schleppegrell, “The Older Language Learner,” 3.

  4For research on the exact size of working memory, see Nelson Cowan, Working Memory Capacity (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2004); Jonathan E. Thiele, Michael S. Pratte, and Jeffrey N. Rouder, “On Perfect Working-Memory Performance with Large Numbers of Items,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 18 (5) (2011): 958–963.

  5For Alan Baddeley’s research on working memory, see Alan D. Baddeley and Graham Hitch, “Working Memory,” Psychology of Learning and Motivation 8 (1974): 47–89.

  6For research on the decline in middle age of the central executive’s ability to deal with competing information, see Elizabeth L. Glisky, “Changes in Cognitive Function in Human Aging,” in Brain Aging: Models, Methods, and Mechanisms, ed. David R. Riddle, 3–20 (Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis, 2007); Lynn Hasher, Rose T. Zacks, and Cynthia P. May, “Inhibitory Control, Circadian Arousal, and Age,” in Attention and Performance XVII: Cognitive Regulation of Performance: Interaction of Theory and Application, ed. Daniel Gopher and Asher Koriat, 653–675 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

  7On the claim that the efficacy of the central executive reaches its peak during one’s twenties, see Cinzia R. De Luca and Richard J. Leventer, “Developmental Trajectories of Executive Functions Across the Lifespan,” in Executive Functions and the Frontal Lobes: A Lifespan Perspective, vol. 3, ed. Vicki Anderson, Rani Jacobs, and Peter J. Anderson, 23–56 (New York: Psychology Press, 2008). For the claim that it does not peak as much as previously thought, see Paul Verhaeghen, “Aging and Executive Control: Reports of a Demise Greatly Exaggerated,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 20 (3) (2011): 174–180.

&nb
sp; 8For the claim that our ability to multitask is not as great as we think and declines over time, see Hironori Ohsugi et al., “Differences in Dual-Task Performance and Prefrontal Cortex Activation between Younger and Older Adults,”BMC Neuroscience 14 (10) (2013), http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/14/10; Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us (New York: Crown, 2010).

  9For more on depth of processing and Craik and Tulving’s classic experiment, see Fergus I. M. Craik and Robert S. Lockhart, “Levels of Processing: A Framework for Memory Research,” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 11 (6) (1972): 671–684; Fergus I. M. Craik and Endel Tulving, “Depth of Processing and the Retention of Words in Episodic Memory,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 104 (3) (1975): 268–294.

  10For a critical view of the depth of processing approach, see, e.g., Alan D. Baddeley, “The Trouble with Levels: A Reexamination of Craik and Lockhart’s Framework for Memory Research,” Psychological review 85 (3) (1978): 139–152.

  11“The most important single factor influencing learning”: David P. Ausubel, Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968), vi.

  12For Ebbinghaus’s proposal of a third way of measuring memory, see Hermann Ebbinghaus, Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology (1885; New York: Dover, 1964).

  13For Squire and Slater’s study of the ability to recognize names of TV programs and racehorses, see Larry R. Squire and Pamela C. Slater, “Forgetting in Very Long-Term Memory as Assessed by an Improved Questionnaire Technique,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory 1 (1) (1975): 50–54.

  14For the claim that recognition memory can be excellent many decades after learning, see Harry P. Bahrick, “Semantic Memory Content in Permastore: Fifty Years of Memory for Spanish Learned in School,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113 (1) (1984): 1–29.