Effortless Conversations, by Lukas Van Vyve.

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Cainntear
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Re: Effortless Conversations, by Lukas Van Vyve.

Postby Cainntear » Sun Feb 23, 2020 1:40 pm

Kraut wrote:I think it is a useful concept: a chunk is a recurrent word combination that in the mind of a native speaker has been merged into one mental concept, the foreign learner of word lists and grammar chapters needs some time to merge the three words into one signifié.
An analogy: several phonemes make up a word, several words make up a chunk, word and chunk have only one mental concept each.
Does the brain really work like this, I don't know.


My point is that the "merged" concept is not an independent concept.

Consider, for example, "poner" and the verbs derived from it by adding a prefix.

"poner" is an irregular verb, and most if not all of the derived forms (suponer, imponer etc) conjugate the same way as poner. Spanish natives and competent non-native speakers don't recall the different verbs as distinct, unrelated items, but at the same time they don't derive the verb from first principles ever time they use it.

It will be different for learners, and there are two approaches to this sort of vocabulary.
You may learn it as a composition of prefix+conjugation of poner, or as an individual vocabulary item. The problem with learning it as an individual vocabulary item rather than a modification of poner is that all of a sudden you're memorising up to about 30 "irregular" verbs instead of one rule.

This is the point of chunking:
That the brain can "bundle together" a collection of known concepts into a single superordinate concept, so that all of those concepts can be recalled simultaneously.
When you recall a word like "imponer" you are automatically recalling im- and poner (and all the grammatical rules that go with it), and you are recalling the half-merged impo... simultaneously.

You chunk by combining known subordinate constituent concepts into a single collective "chunk" that can be recalled as a unit, and recalling the unit activates the subordinate concept.

Recalling a morpheme chunk automatically triggers recall of the phonemes it is made of.

Recalling a word automatically triggers recall of the morphemes it is made of, which automatically triggers recall of all the phonemes the morphemes are made of.

Recalling a fixed phrase automatically triggers recall of the words it is made of, which automatically triggers recall of the morphemes the words are made of, in turn automatically triggering recall of the phonemes the morphemes are made of.

Then we get to so-called "semi-fixed phrases", which are chunks that have free variables and can be modified. For example, "at the end of the day" is a fixed phrase -- no words in the phrase can be modified without breaking it; "[a] figment of his imagination", the example used in the book you quoted, is a "semi-fixed phrase" in that we have a single "free variable" to modify: whose imagination we're talking about.

Recall of a semi-fixed phrase absolutely requires selective recall of grammatical rules as well as a string of fixed sounds, and it's the standard grammatical rule that it inherits from its constituents, not a new grammatical rule unique to the chunk.


A "chunk" is a combination of things you already know. If you don't already know the things, it's not a "chunk", it's just a really long morpheme.
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Kraut
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Re: Effortless Conversations, by Lukas Van Vyve.

Postby Kraut » Wed Oct 20, 2021 11:38 pm

a 24-page exposé

Learning language in chunks
Part of the Cambridge Papers in ELT series
July 2019

https://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/wp-c ... Chunks.pdf
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Re: Effortless Conversations, by Lukas Van Vyve.

Postby Cainntear » Thu Oct 21, 2021 11:17 pm

Kraut wrote:a 24-page exposé

Learning language in chunks
Part of the Cambridge Papers in ELT series
July 2019

https://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/wp-c ... Chunks.pdf

Hmmm... my first complaint is where they start to define chunks:
page 5 wrote:(Krishnamurthy (2002: 289) prefers the term ‘chunk’ since, being relatively recent, it has ‘less baggage associated with it’.)

It is only relatively recent in terms of its use in language teaching circles, and indeed it makes no mention of the concept as discussed by psychologists as far back as the 1970s.

The problem with the term "chunking" here is that it's not clearly self-descriptive, and it readily allows reinterpretation by whoever uses it. I'm pretty certain that I learned about chunking in the psychological sense during my undergrad English studies, and it was in the same context as the lexical approach, but since then I've never discussed the lexical approach with anyone who actually understood the idea of chunking as explained by psychologists.

My recollection is that the Open University's English team were of the opinion that Lewis's lexical approach was something of an oversimplification of otherwise sound psycholinguistic principles.

Something I absolutely agree with here:
page 6 wrote:However, it would be unwise to assume that what corpus data reveal about recurring sequences necessarily reflects the way that these sequences are mentally organised.

You can't always tell how a machine works by looking at its outputs alone, and the goal of teaching is to enable the student to build their own internal machinery for the target language. A machine that produces identical output in controlled conditions will not produce identical output in less controlled condition if the internal machinery is not sufficiently similar to a known good machine.

page 16 wrote:Whatever procedures we adopt, it is worth bearing in mind that chunks are really just ‘big words’

Only in the sense that a word is composed of multiple morphemes, so not true in a 100% analytic language.

My understanding of chunking in psychology is that the activation of the structure encoding a complex concept activates the structures of all the simpler concepts is composed of. Recall of a fixed phrase automatically triggers the recall of the words and grammatical structures involved in the final construction.
The saving of time occurs not because the brain has to recall less, it's because it recalls it all at the same time.

I am quite certain that if you try to learn a "chunk" without learning its component parts, you are indeed learning a word... and not a chunk, because you don't have the structures internalised that you would need.
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Re: Effortless Conversations, by Lukas Van Vyve.

Postby Cainntear » Sun Oct 24, 2021 2:59 pm

I think I might have been a bit waffly above, so here's the TLDR:
page 6 wrote:However, it would be unwise to assume that what corpus data reveal about recurring sequences necessarily reflects the way that these sequences are mentally organised.

Despite this, the article involves no discussion of the way these sequences are mentally organised and then draws its conclusions entirely from what corpus data reveal about recurring sequences:
page 16 wrote:Whatever procedures we adopt, it is worth bearing in mind that chunks are really just ‘big words’


So while there's some good information in there about what people do at present, there is no real evaluation of whether or how they work.
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