THE EFFECT OF SYNTACTIC INFORMATION, PRAGMATIC EXPECTATION, AND COGNITIVE STYLE ON LEARNERS' COMPREHENSION OF A SECOND LANGUAGE

Efforts to understand second language development have seen only limited success as they have concentrated on an examination of linguistic products and grammatical competence. A growing interest in the learners' cognitive processes and individual differences demands broader-based research. The theoretical framework for this study sees language development as the result of sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic processes, drawing on grammatical competence and more general cognitive processes and priorities in order to achieve successful communication. The study therefore investigated the interplay of several learner variables which might affect the outcome of second language development: syntactic information, pragmatic expectation, and cognitive style. It focused on beginning comprehension strategies because of the significant role of comprehension in acquiring a new language, the methodological advantages of manipulating input for comprehension, and the relative dearth of comprehension studies in the literature on second language development. It was hypothesized that beginning language learners rely more on their pragmatic expectations than on syntactic information for comprehending novel utterances and that cognitive style (in this case field-dependence-independence) affects the learners' success in comprehending sentences which require disembedding of linguistic forms.;These results imply that certain strategies, other than formal linguistic analysis, account for early second language comprehension, which may result from the same two-step process that has been suggested for first language comprehension: (1) an application of semantic strategies, such as attending to content words and making a non-syntactic interpretation of their meaning based on knowledge of the world, and (2) an application of syntactic strategies to interpret meaning based on selected syntactic cues. These findings also suggest that language teachers can permit learners to use these well-developed comprehension strategies to make progress toward the development of second language proficiency. In so doing, teachers would be less likely to create in their students a feeling that second language learning is an unnatural and threatening activity. More important, learners might be able to build a second language system that utilizes the same useful sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic resources as their first language.;Forty English-speaking undergraduates used a self-instructional program to learn a minimal amount of Italian vocabulary and syntax (active and passive voice, third person singular, present tense). They were then individually administered a comprehension test on novel utterances using the vocabulary and syntax which had been learned to 90% criterion. An analysis of variance of the comprehension scores revealed that probable sentences were comprehended better than improbable ones and active sentences better than passive ones. In addition, pragmatic expectation took precedence over syntactic information. Cognitive style did not make a significant difference in comprehension. The findings were the same when the learners were subsequently asked to translate the test sentences.