Does early speaking lead to fossilized mistakes?

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aaleks
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Re: Does early speaking lead to fossilized mistakes?

Postby aaleks » Tue Apr 25, 2017 12:59 pm

Cainntear wrote:It means no attempt to produce language at all to begin with.
I don't believe in it myself, as it seems to assume learning a second language is like learning a first, which is not true.

Thank you. It seems I got the idea right.
And I don't believe in it either, because of my "unvoluntary" experience with that approach. My level of reading and listening is somewhere about C1/C2 now but at the same time my writing and speaking are hardly B1. Partly these problems can be fixed by learning/relearning/revising of grammar rules, but only partly, because writing, even in native tongue, is a separate skill. By the way, kids learn to express their thoughts by communication and correction during all school years, the silent period usually ends when they turn the age of 2-3. I know, by my own experience too, that exposure to a target language can help to develop so-called feeling of language, but that thing just shut down when I speak or write. I can "detect" mistakes but unfortunately not my own :D
In my opinion, unbalanced skills could lead to fossilized mistake and the cause would be the same as in case with early speaking - you try speak or write at the level which in fact too high to you at the moment because you get tricked by your passive skills.
And I agree with s_allard too:
s_allard wrote:The "silent period" idea, often associated with the Assimil method, does not prevent fossilized mistakes. Fossilization comes from uncorrected mistakes. Learners always make mistakes even after waiting to speak. Lack of correction is the problem.
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Re: Does early speaking lead to fossilized mistakes?

Postby reineke » Tue Apr 25, 2017 5:06 pm

Cainntear wrote:
aaleks wrote:Since “silent period” is one of the ways to prevent fossilized mistake, I'd want to clear something for myself about it. Does “silent period” mean that during this period of time a language learner will train speaking and writing but just doesn’t communicate with other “real” people in a target language? Or it means no (or almost no) attempt to speak or write in the language at all? I’ve heard several of Krashen’s lecture on youtube but I’m afraid I might get something wrong.

It means no attempt to produce language at all to begin with.

I don't believe in it myself, as it seems to assume learning a second language is like learning a first, which is not true.


Speaking of hobby horses...

I learned Italian and German while relaxing with compelling incomprehensible input. I wasn't practicing anything and I wasn't even trying to learn a new language. After years of neglect, my Dialang score was C2 in German (listening comprehension) . In 2009 I joined a couple of Goethe-Institut courses trying to "activate" my German. My pronunciation and error rate were considerably better than any of the other students in a B2 class. In a couple of C1 classes the students who were truly good at German had unconventional backgrounds. I wasn't able to "activate". For that to happen, according to Prof. Huliganov, I would need 5 days of intense immersive experience.

I find forced silent periods boring. Since it's a poorly researched area of adult second language acquisition, it is difficult to claim that a silent period is a way of preventing fossilized mistakes. Once you start producing language, you will automatize. A short writing exercise on lang-8 may help you determine if your output is worthy of prime time. As you get better, your error rate should decrease. Error correction may be of value, but it's reasonable to expect that the fewer mistakes you make from day 1 of your sustained language production the better you'll come out at the end of the day.

Also, if you take a look at what I've posted about reading, a silent period consisting of sustained silent reading may result in fossilized pronunciation. Germans may fare better than English speakers when reading French assuming they pay some attention to decoding. However, English speakers who are studying Western languages have a lot going for them if they pay attention to pronunciation and decoding.

A silent period consisting of only listening may result in "holes" due to redundancy, the inability to "catch" endings and certain particles, the inability to perceive some sounds etc... Ask Cainntear for details. This is not my experience but I've never attempted to learn Arabic or Korean. Ideally, a silent period should be followed by pronunciation practice. This is also a good time to combine reading and listening.
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Re: Does early speaking lead to fossilized mistakes?

Postby Dylan95 » Fri Apr 28, 2017 7:41 am

I think its completely fine to start speaking right from the beginning.


IF

You have someone correcting your mistakes.
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Re: Does early speaking lead to fossilized mistakes?

Postby Cainntear » Fri Apr 28, 2017 2:27 pm

reineke wrote:I find forced silent periods boring. Since it's a poorly researched area of adult second language acquisition, it is difficult to claim that a silent period is a way of preventing fossilized mistakes. Once you start producing language, you will automatize.

Interesting that you explicitly reject the notion of a silent period, and then effectively restate the justification for silent periods in teaching. ;)

The assertion proponents of a silent period make is that production leads to fossilisation. I don't have a problem with that, as long as we caveat it as uncorrected errors in production. However, the assumption that a lack of production means no fossilisation has never been measurably proven, as you say.

And why should it? As a learner, you make your theory of what the language is, and you are proven or disproven by both noticing of input and feedback on output. I don't see any mechanism where learning by exposure won't allow a particular theory to fossilise.
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Re: Does early speaking lead to fossilized mistakes?

Postby YtownPolyglot » Fri Apr 28, 2017 7:24 pm

I believe in what I call the Gentle Stretch.

In the foreign language classes I took in high school and college, speaking and listening were more of a priority than reading and writing in the very first weeks. We weren't permitted to see (and ostensibly be confused by) written French for almost a month.

Of course, what we were doing was parroting chunks of dialogue and very simple answers to questions.

The Gentle Stretch is when you are gradually introduced to patterns in the language and are encouraged to come up with original responses. You are exposed to increasingly challenging input and expected to do more and more in response.
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Re: Does early speaking lead to fossilized mistakes?

Postby leosmith » Fri Apr 28, 2017 11:43 pm

If fossilization comes from uncorrected mistakes, then they are inevitable. So to what extent do we go to prevent fossilization?

I personally believe overcorrection is more damaging than undercorrection. I find that self correction is far more effective than being corrected by others. Learning in a well-rounded way gives me a heightened awareness of errors, my own and others, so I am constantly noting them, and noting eventually leads to permanent correction in my experience. Of course it's necessary to get some corrections from others, but I find that if I avoid it as much as possible I still get plenty.

The idea that we need to put a huge amount of effort in avoiding errors in output, and/or that we need a diligent teacher there to correct our every mistake, is a bad one imo.
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Re: Does early speaking lead to fossilized mistakes?

Postby reineke » Tue May 02, 2017 8:02 pm

Cainntear wrote:
aaleks wrote:“silent period"

... means no attempt to produce language at all to begin with.

I don't believe in it myself, as it seems to assume learning a second language is like learning a first, which is not true.


Cainntear wrote:
s_allard wrote:Finally, a concrete example that demonstrates how all this high-level theoretical discussion works. It seems here that our French speaker learning English will realize the voiced TH of "that" as "dat" and the unvoiced TH of "thin" as "tin". French speakers have a problem with the two sounds of the English TH because they do not exist in French. It is actually very interesting to note that European French speakers will approximate these sounds with "z" and "s" rather than "d" and "t". The latter sounds are more common in the English of speakers of Canadian French.

What we have to keep in mind is that these speakers actually hear the real "TH" sounds.

Do they?
When they attempt to reproduce these sounds,

Do they?
the approximate or rather incorrect variants come out. We see something similar when an English speaker learning French tries to say "la rue" and it sounds like "la roue".

Actually, most French speakers can't hear the sounds except in a physical sense -- that is how phonemes work.

When a sound hits your ear, it isn't processed as raw data -- it is processed into phonemes. Your brain will map every received speech sound to a phoneme that it has in its acquired phoneme map. If you haven't acquired the phoneme, it's not part of your map, so you won't hear it.

Many people point at success in close listening as proof that this is not the case, but there is a marked difference between listening for something consciously and being able to recognise it unconsciously.
I don't understand this idea that fixing a pronunciation mistake will break something else.

Probably because you haven't made any effort to understand my argument.
My observation is that when a sound is corrected it will quickly and automatically spread to all the contexts

That is precisely the problem -- the correction of the pronunciation of "the sound" spreads to all contexts, but the core error is that the learner has a wrong notion of what "the sound" is. Even though they are consciously aware that they're talking about two sounds, their internal, unconscious model of the language still sees them as a single phoneme. A "correction" to that phoneme will affect all words using that phoneme.

Until the learner's internal model recognises that /t/ and /θ/ are different phonemes, the problem is uncorrectable. But you cannot just open up your brain, take all the words with that incorrect phoneme and split them into two. This is why it's an extremely difficult

especially since the spelling will be often helpful.

Unfortunately the spelling is of no immediate relevance to the learner's model of the language, which is why so many spelling mistakes reflect problems with the learner's pronunciation -- for example, learners of French who don't pronounce a difference between E, È and É generally end up forgetting which one goes where. This also holds for native speakers -- for example South American Spanish speakers commonly make mistakes with S and Z in writing because they make no distinction in speaking.
The student has to be first shown how to articulate the sound. Then a bunch of exercises to practice with. A tongue twister like "Is this the thing? - Yes, this is the thing." can be useful. Then away you go. Correcting pronunciation articulation takes time of course but that's the nature of the beast.

...if articulation was the problem.

But this brings us back to the core of the thread topic, because if we talk about early speaking, articulation is the problem and/or the solution.

People who speak early without proper guidance start to reinforce patterns using a faulty phoneme map, but if early instruction is given on articulation, it forces them to build up a serviceable phoneme map that can be refined later.

Some people claim that not speaking (i.e. listening only) will give them the opportunity to build up a phoneme map, but as I explained above, that's contrary to what we know about how the brain processes language. In fact, I'd say it's so counter-scientific that I'd describe it as a faith position.

What causes fossilised pronunciation problems is not speaking, or the lack of it -- it's a failure to teach/learn phonemics at an early stage.

The key is correction. These mistakes come from the interaction with the native language. If these pronunciations go uncorrected, the learner will probably keep making the same mistakes forever. And the student has to of course apply these corrections.

{Citation needed} There are uncountable numbers of papers out there showing the limited power of correction at a later stage.

But the main point here is that whether we call these fossilizations or bad habits, in my opinion, they are all the same thing. Bad habits are of course hard to change. If you've been speaking a certain way for 40 years, you're not going to change overnight. The way the term fossilization is used by some people, it seems that it's game over.

Again, I'll say if you don't believe in fossilisation, say you don't believe in fossilisation. A fossilised error is an uncorrectable (or nearly uncorrectable) error -- if you do not believe there is such a thing, say it; don't just keep abusing the word.

It's a heck of a lot like saying that unicorns exist, and you've got one living down the road... just that it's a myth that unicorns have horns.
No, that's a horse, and unicorns don't exist.


Thou shalt build your language learning theories on a firm rock. Good luck finding one.

UCSF Team Reveals How the Brain Recognizes Speech Sounds

Shaping of Sound by Our Mouths Leaves an Acoustic Trail the Brain Can Follow, Say Researchers

Excerpts

"Scientists have known for some time the location in the brain where speech sounds are interpreted, but little has been discovered about how this process works....

the UCSF team reports that the brain does not respond to the individual sound segments known as phonemes – such as the b sound in “boy” – but is instead exquisitely tuned to detect simpler elements, which are known to linguists as “features. ”

This organization may give listeners an important advantage in interpreting speech, the researchers said, since the articulation of phonemes varies considerably across speakers, and even in individual speakers over time.

“This is a very an intriguing glimpse into speech processing,” said Chang, associate professor of neurological surgery and physiology. “The brain regions where speech is processed in the brain had been identified, but no one has really known how that processing happens.”

Although we usually find it effortless to understand other people when they speak, parsing the speech stream is an impressive perceptual feat.

Speech is a highly complex and variable acoustic signal, and our ability to instantaneously break that signal down into individual phonemes and then build those segments back up into words, sentences and meaning is a remarkable capability.

Many researchers have presumed that brain cells
in the STG would respond to phonemes. But the researchers found instead that regions of the STG are tuned to respond to even more elemental acoustic features that reference the particular way that speech sounds are generated from the vocal tract.

Chang said the arrangement the team discovered in the STG is reminiscent of feature detectors in the visual system for edges and shapes, which allow us to recognize objects, like bottles, no matter which perspective we view them from. Given the variability of speech across speakers and situations, it makes sense, said co-author Keith Johnson, PhD, professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley, for the brain to employ this sort of feature-based algorithm to reliably identify phonemes.

“By studying all of the speech sounds in English, we found is that the brain has a systematic organization for basic sound feature units, kind of like elements in the periodic table.”

https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2014/01/11150 ... ech-sounds

The Perceptual and Production Training of /d, tap, r/ in L2 Spanish: Behavioral, Psycholinguistic, and Neurolinguistic Evidence

"Past research has reported that perceptual training alone improves both perception and production and that production training alone improves both as well,

This study also uses cross-modal priming and ERP data in addition to traditional tasks (identification and production tasks) to evaluate the effect of training, an innovative use of both tasks to determine if trainees not only perceive and produce the trained L2 contrasts but also if they unconsciously process these contrasts and if they have built new phonemic categories for these sounds. All three training paradigms improved English learners' perception or production. While production trainees did not improve in their overall perception and declined in their perception of one contrast, perception trainees improved in their production and overall perception, indicating that perception training transfers more effectively than production training."

https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/handle/18 ... ?show=full
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Re: Does early speaking lead to fossilized mistakes?

Postby Cainntear » Tue May 02, 2017 8:49 pm

Now that is fascinating. I've always been in favour of looking at contrasts like voiced vs unvoiced, aspirated vs unaspirated, but I've never really had the guts to put it into practice.
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