Categorization and L2 Vocabulary Learning

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

This chapter provides an outline of the whole thesis. It starts with the identification of the research gap in Section 1.1. Section 1.2 states the general objective of this research. Section 1.3 states briefly the theoretical supports for this research. Section 1.4 presents the specific hypotheses derived from the general objective and the methodology adopted to test the hypotheses. The last section in this chapter, Section 1.5, presents the organizational structure of the thesis.

1.1 The identification of the research gap

To a language learner, words are undoubtedly the most important component of language. As Wilkins (1972) states, “without grammar very little can be conveyed; without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed” (p.111). The significance of vocabulary in foreign/second language (abbreviated as L2 in the later occurrences and in this research, English as a foreign language is specified rather than English as a second language) learning has been further emphasized in the mid-1980s when doubts were cast upon the idea that having complete control of the grammatical rules of a language was mastery of that language. The proposal that language is by nature a tool for communication has finally moved vocabulary learning to the center of L2 learning. This central position of vocabulary in L2 learning is explicitly stated in McCarthy (1990),

No matter how well the student learns grammar, no matter how successfully the sounds of L2 are mastered, without words to express a wider range of meanings, communication in an L2 just cannot happen in any meaningful way. (p. viii)

One important issue in the domain of L2 vocabulary learning is concerned with the relationship between the already existing conceptual system and the L2 lexicon. In comparison with first-language (abbreviated as L1 in the later occurrences) learners, L2 learners already possess a conceptual system through the acquisition of their L1 and have the experience of establishing connections between lexical forms and concepts¹ in their minds. In view of this factor, much ← 1 | 2 → research has indicated that learning words in an L2 should be easier for adults than learning words in an L1 for children. For children, the learning of a word is usually “interwoven with their cognitive, conceptual, and social growth” (Stern 1992, p. 256). For example, a child learning the English word “tree” simultaneously tries to form the concept TREE, to figure out what it includes and what it excludes. But for adult L2 learners, being previous L1 acquirers who already possess a large stock of concepts, a large proportion of L2 vocabulary learning does not involve a combination of concept formation and linguistic knowledge acquisition. Rather, relabeling the existing concepts, albeit there is a lack of a complete match in the L1 for an L2 word, seems to be the major task for adult L2 learners (e.g., Henriksen 1999). L2 learners, with the conceptual system obtained along with the acquisition of his or her L1, are very likely to short-cut, especially at the initial stage of L2 vocabulary learning, the process of constructing a concept for an L2 word, by mapping it directly or indirectly via its L1 equivalent onto the concept underlying its L1 equivalent. The role of the L1-based conceptual system in L2 vocabulary learning is what’s of interest in the current empirical study.

Few researchers would deny that the existence of the L1-based conceptual system would enable an L2 learner to learn an L2 item without having to learn to categorize the world from scratch again. But the exact role of the L1-based conceptual system in L2 vocabulary learning is far from fully unfolded. Stern (1992), in summing up the instructional options to be considered in L2 teaching, has called for more attention to the role of the L1. He argues that the role of the L1 in L2 learning, or the “intralingual-crosslingual” dimension as is termed by Stern, is one of the three fundamental issues (the other two being the “analyticexperiential” dimension and the “explicit-implicit” dimension) which deserves systematic investigation (p. 278).

A good place to start the empirical exploration into the role of the L1-based conceptual system in L2 learning is lexical acquisition since individual words represent the area where direct associations between language and conceptual structures are probably clearest (e.g., De Groot 1993; Singleton 1995). The question has indeed been widely addressed from various perspectives of how the concepts a person has acquired through his or her L1 experience may influence his or her learning and use of an L2 (e.g., Ameel, Malt, Storms, & Assche 2009; Athanasopoulos 2009; Comesaña, Perea, Piñeiro, & Fraga 2009; Gass & Selinker 1994; Henriksen 1999; Jiang 2000, 2002, 2004; Kellerman 1995; Meara, Lightbown, & Halter 1994; Paradis 1997; Pavlenko 2010; Sanaoui 1995; ← 2 | 3 → Slobin 1996). The general consensus reached in the relevant literature is that the L1-based concepts do play a role in a person’s learning and use of L2 words, as reflected in the mapping of L2 words onto the existing concepts, especially at the initial stage of L2 vocabulary learning.

Two deficiencies, however, have been identified in the previous literature on the role of the L1-based conceptual system in L2 vocabulary learning. The first deficiency is concerned with the perspective taken to explain the observation that L2 learners map an L2 word upon the existing concept. The second deficiency is concerned with the specific elements which have been investigated in the previous research. Detailed discussions of the two deficiencies are provided as below.

The first deficiency is the inadequate devotion of empirical efforts to explore the relationship between extralinguistic conceptualization and L2 vocabulary learning. In spite of the importance of this issue under concern, empirical evidence remains sparse. Among the existing proposals in the relevant literature concerning L2 learners’ reliance on the L1-based conceptual system, many are theoretical propositions which await empirical confirmation. Jiang (2000) explicitly stated that the mapping of L2 lexical forms to the existing concepts “has been widely assumed rather than treated as a central topic for investigation in the study of L2 vocabulary acquisition” (p. 617–618). Plenty of empirical evidence suggests that L2 learners do cut short the process of observing an L2 word’s various references and collocations by mapping the word directly onto its L1 equivalent and hence onto the underlying concept or conceptual structure (e.g., Altarriba & Mathis 1997; Jiang 2000, 2002, 2004; Singleton 2006). Nevertheless, the discussion provided in the previous literature stops at the verification of the proposal that the L1-based conceptual system still underlies a person’s learning and use of an L2 (e.g., Gass & Selinker 1994; Kellerman 1995)². Only very few studies address the issue at a deeper level as to whether the appearance of L1-based conceptual content in L2 vocabulary system has anything to do with perception or with extralinguistic conceptualization or concept categorization (e.g., Jarvis 1998, 2000a, 2000b). Empirical studies on the questions related to this mapping process, as stressed in Jiang (2000), are essential if we are to better understand the underlying mechanisms as well as the nature of L2 vocabulary learning.

Concepts are mental representations that, on the one hand, correspond to particular words in the linguistic system and, on the other hand, refer to classes of things in the world, which are divided by one of the brain’s fundamental ← 3 | 4 → cognitive faculties called “categorization”. The relationship between categorization, concepts, and words can be described as follows. It is via categorization that people divide things into groups in the mental world. The outcome of such a cognitive process is the formation of conceptual categories in people’s minds and normally those conceptual categories are labeled by words. The above described relationship among categorization, concepts, and words can be drawn in the following concise way: the objective world → categorization → conceptual categories → concepts → words. In view of the intrinsic relationship revealed above, it is reasonable to make the claim that the exploration into the role of the L1-based conceptual system in L2 vocabulary learning should go beyond the conceptual level by including the study of the relationship between vocabulary learning and principles of human categorization in general. It is this perspective that the current research is interested in.

The second deficiency is concerned with the specific elements of the conceptual system which have been investigated. The conceptual system is called “a system” for it is composed of two parts, namely individual concepts and the relationship among various concepts or the construction of the conceptual system. The majority of the studies in the relevant literature have focused on the level of individual words, namely the semantic or conceptual transfer from individual L1 words to the so-called individual L2 equivalents (e.g., Jiang 2000, 2002, 2004). Few studies, however, have been conducted to look into the influence of the construction of the conceptual system, for example the patterns of concept categorization formed along with the establishment of the L1-based conceptual system, upon L2 vocabulary learning and use. As has been convincingly argued in an Experientialist account (e.g., Lakoff 1987), speakers of different languages have different ways of categorizing experience, whose effects can be observed in how concepts are expressed through language. One theoretical implication of the observations of the above kind is that the L1-based patterns of concept categorization will also have an impact upon L2 vocabulary learning and use as they do upon L1 vocabulary learning and use and hence can be detected in learners’ L2 vocabulary system.

Scott Jarvis (1998) is one of the few researchers who have addressed the relationship between human categorization and L2 lexical use. Intrigued by the argument in Experientialism (e.g., Lakoff 1987) that speakers of different languages have different ways of categorizing experience, Jarvis designed a series of tasks to address the question of whether the differences in the way speakers of different languages categorize their experiences could be seen in their use of lexical reference (or specifically referential word choice relative to a controlled set of stimuli) in the L2. The participants recruited in Jarvis’ study included native speakers of Finnish and native speakers of Swedish living in Finland ³ ← 4 | 5 →. These participants completed three primary tasks both in their respective L1s and in English (i.e., their L2): 1) writing a narrative recount of a silent film, 2) producing nouns and verbs which they felt appropriate to refer to the objects and events shown in the silent film, and 3) judging the given nouns and verbs to see whether they were appropriate to refer to the aforementioned objects and events. The major findings were as follows: 1) learners who spoke the same L1 had a strong tendency to choose the same words to refer to the aforementioned objects and events; 2) moderate semantic agreement was detected between learners’ L1 and their English referential word choices; 3) an unexpected result was that Finns and Swedes did not differ considerably in their English lexical reference, which could be accounted for by the fact that they also did not differ significantly from each other in their use of their respective L1s. It is a pity that no consistent differences were found between Finns’ and Swedes’ use of their own mother tongues. But Jarvis’ study has been highly valued by the findings that learners from the same language background showed greater similarities with one another (e.g., showing stronger word choice tendencies while referring to the given objects and events and having a moderate semantic agreement between their L1 and L2 referential word choices) than they did with learners from a different language background. Another value of Jarvis’ study is the empirical exploration and revelation of how Finns and Swedes also differed considerably from native speakers of English in the English referential word choices. With regard to its relevance to the current research, Jarvis’ study is encouraging and inspiring in terms of the introduction of a new perspective, namely the Cognitive Linguistic perspective, to the study of the role of the L1-based conceptual system in L2 vocabulary learning.

The field of linguistics has witnessed a paradigm shift from the generative paradigm to the cognitive linguistic paradigm. One of the essential differences between the two paradigms concerns the relationship between language and cognition. In the generative paradigm, language is depicted as “an autonomous, self-containing system” (Chomsky 1986, p. 24) which exists independently of any human cognitive abilities or its users. In the Cognitive Linguistic paradigm, however, language is “an integrated part of human cognition which operates in interaction with and on the basis of the same principles as other cognitive faculties” (Dirven 2005, p. 17). In this Cognitive Linguistic paradigm, language issues are investigated in terms of their relations to other cognitive faculties such as perception, conception, categorization, abstract thought, reasoning, and ← 5 | 6 → inference as well as to other cognitive domains such as bodily and mental experiences, image-schemas, viewing frames, etc (e.g., Ungerer & Schmid 1996). Cognitive Linguistics provides a new framework within which language can be described and explained “in the larger context of both human cognitive capacities and cultural preoccupations” (Jing-Smith 2010, p. 157). This Cognitive-Linguistic framework entails a further exploration into the relationship between the extra-linguistic human categorization and L2 vocabulary learning.

As discussed above, Cognitive Linguistics regards language as an integral part of general cognitive processes. Based on this conception of language, cognitive linguists further propose that there is a motivational relationship between the surface linguistic manifestations and the underlying conceptual structures (e.g., Lakoff 1987; Langacker 1999, 2000; Taylor 1989, 1995; Bowerman and Choi 2003). The tenet that motivation in language is both primary and pervasive has led Cognitive Linguistics well to language acquisition and teaching. As argued in Kristiansen, Achard, Dirven, and de Mendoza (2006), language pedagogy is an ideal domain “for systematically investigating the pervasiveness of how language in use and other cognitive faculties interact” (p. 15). There are numerous proposals for putting the basic assumptions and insights of Cognitive Linguistics to good use in instructed language acquisition (see Boers and Lindstromberg 2006, for a review). Book series have increasingly been published in the last few years, devoted to highlighting the significance of Cognitive Linguistics in language acquisition and pedagogy or calling for adopting a Cognitive Linguistic perspective to applied linguistic research. The first collective volume explicitly dedicated to the integration of insights from Cognitive Linguistics into L2 learning and teaching is Pütz, Niemeier, and Dirven (2001). There are also volumes which focus on the acquisition/comprehension of vocabulary and phraseology (e.g., Boers & Lindstromberg 2008), on pedagogical grammar (e.g., De Knop & De Rycker 2008), and on pedagogy-oriented Cognitive Linguistics (e.g., De Knop, Boers, & De Rycker 2010). Blooming as Cognitive-Linguistic-inspired approaches are in language pedagogy, inadequate attention has been paid to examining the role of the existing conceptual system in an L2 learner’s mind in his or her learning of the L2.

The inadequacy of the related research, as discussed above, has provided the basis for the launching of the present research, namely an empirical investigation into the role of the L1-based conceptual system in L2 vocabulary learning from a Cognitive-Linguistic, or specifically Experientialist, perspective. In this research, I argue for the integration of the general principles of categorization into L2 vocabulary learning. ← 6 | 7 →

1.2 The general objective of the research

I shall begin by highlighting the stance of the current research in the theoretical controversy concerning the nature of L2 conceptual system, namely the dual conceptual model⁴ versus the unitary conceptual model⁵. While Between the two competing models in bilingualism⁶, the latter one is adopted in this research (see Chapter 4 for a detailed discussion of the reasons). In other words, in an L2 learner’s mind, there is only one conceptual system.

The present research, focusing on investigating the role of the L1-based conceptual system in L2 vocabulary learning, is an attempt to rectify the deficiencies in the relevant literature discussed in Section 1.1. The specific angle taken here involves two most prominent patterns of concept categorization depicted in the theory of prototypes and basic-level categories, namely the basiclevel effect and the prototypicality effect. Two goals are to be achieved. First of all, by taking a Cognitive-Linguistic perspective and looking into the relationship between categorization and L2 vocabulary learning, this research aims to provide, on the basis of empirical evidence, some concrete accounts of how patterns of concept categorization in the L1 conceptual system operate in learners’ L2 vocabulary learning. Second, this research also aims to introduce Experientialism, a fundamental theory of Cognitive Linguistics, into L2 research in order to test whether its premises and predictions will be confirmed in the L2 setting as they have been in the L1 setting. Specifically, this research aims to make the two fundamental insights of Experientialism, i.e., the basic-level effect and the prototypicality effect, relevant to the teaching of L2 vocabulary. ← 7 | 8 →

1.3 Theoretical support

The argument in this research, i.e., the necessity of incorporating principles of human categorization into L2 vocabulary learning, is raised on the basis of the following three theoretical propositions: (1) the conceptual model of word meaning and learning; (2) the notion of one single conceptual system in the minds of L2 learners; and (3) the Experientialist account of language. A brief discussion will be given below to each of the three theoretical propositions.

(1) The conceptual model of word meaning and learning