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Reviewed by:
  • Declarative and procedural determinants of second languages
  • David W. Green
Declarative and procedural determinants of second languages. By Michel Paradis. (Studies in bilingualism 40.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009. Pp. 219. ISBN 9789027241771. $54.

This excellent, lucid, and scholarly work is a treatise on the conceptual basis of our understanding of second language (L2) appropriation and use, and the neural systems that subserve it. It is an important extension of Michel Paradis’s seminal work on the neurolinguistic theory of bilingualism (Paradis 2004). [End Page 735]

Ch. 1 spells out and defines the key concepts and lays out the crucial aspects of the argument. P distinguishes acquisition and learning: acquisition refers to implicit items and processes, learning to explicit (conscious) items and processes. Appropriation is used whenever reference is made either to the process of acquiring a language (or an aspect of it) implicitly or to the process of learning a language (or an aspect of it) explicitly. Implicit linguistic competence (‘knowing-how’) and metalinguistic knowledge (‘knowing that’) are different in kind (xi). This fundamental conceptual point lies at the center of a rigorous exercise in clearing muddled thinking and in exploring the behavioral and neural bases of L2 performance.

P was the first to propose that implicit linguistic competence is mediated by a procedural system whose operations are inaccessible to consciousness, whereas metalinguistic knowledge is mediated by a declarative system. The targets of these memory systems are not specifically linguistic. On the contrary, the procedural system also sustains motor and cognitive skills, and is subserved by a distinct network of brain regions (both cortical and subcortical). Likewise, a declarative system sustains memory for facts as well as for explicit linguistic rules and vocabulary (i.e. the form-meaning relations of vocabulary items), and is subserved by cortical structures in the temporal lobe. The implicit grammatical properties of words (such as the number of arguments a verb takes, or that the past tense in English adds -ed to the verbal stem) are part of the lexicon and a component of implicit linguistic competence. Of course, a speaker may become aware of those grammatical properties through instruction. Such information is then represented as part of metalinguistic declarative knowledge, but it differs in kind from the corresponding implicit features of the lexicon. The general point is that an explicit linguistic rule represented in the declarative system does not characterize the computation of the implicit linguistic system. Speakers can only become aware of the output of the systems of implicit linguistic competence but cannot observe how that output is produced. The two types of representation and process therefore coexist, and neither can serve as the input to the other. A further important point is that linguistic processes in a person’s first language (L1) make use of representations deriving from both declarative and procedural systems. What differs is the relative involvement of these two systems in a person’s L2.

For an L2, the proposal is that after an optimal period the language is learned and not acquired. Under formal teaching conditions, declarative rather than procedural representations initially mediate performance of L2. High levels of proficiency in an L2 are possible through speeded-up control of declarative representations, though details of how such representations control speech output remain to be spelled out. With practice, another route is possible. L2 speakers may shift from reliance on metalinguistic knowledge to more extensive use of implicit linguistic competence. Given the extensive use of an L2 in a community of its speakers, morphosyntax, for example, may become automatized, and reflect an independent system of implicit linguistic competence in L2 like that sustaining L1. Such use is characterized by systematicity in performance that may or may not correspond with that evinced by native speakers. This contrast between implicit linguistic competence and metalinguistic knowledge is at the heart of subsequent chapters that address and elaborate further substantive claims about the relationship between these two types of representation and the nature of studies that are informative about them.

Ch. 2 examines the role of awareness in the emergence of implicit competence. Conscious experience arises from cerebral processes associated with explicit representations: such representations are either metalinguistic or the...

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