Restructuring

BARRY MCLAUGHLIN
University of California, Santa Cruz

This paper argues for a cognitive psychological approach to second language

phenomena that emphasizes the importance of the development of auto-
maticity and the process of restructuring. It is argued that practice can lead to
improvement in performance as sub-skills become automated, but it is also

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possible for increased practice to create conditions for restructuring, with
attendant decrements in performance as learners reorganize their internal
representationalframework.In the second case, performance may follow a
U-shaped curve, declining as more complex internal representations replace
less complex ones, and increasing again as skill becomes expertise. Examples
are drawn from first and second language research, and from research on
expert systems. The cognitive approach is not seen as competitive to, but as
complementary with, linguistic approaches to second language development.

In the past two decades a major development has occurred in psychology as the
field moved away from the behaviourism of the past to contemporary cognitive
psychology. There were several consequences of this metanoia. For one thing,
psychologists returned to psychological questions. Contemporary cognitive
psychology emphasizes knowing, rather than responding. Cognitive psycholo-
gists are concerned with finding scientific means for studying the mental
processes involved in the acquisition and application of knowledge. The focus is
not stimulus-response bonds, but mental events. To paraphrase Chomsky,
calling psychology 'behavioral science' is like designating natural science 'the
science of meter readings' (Chomsky 1968: 58). To call psychology the science
of behavior is to confuse the evidence studied (behavior) with the goal of the
study (understanding of the human mind).
A second characteristic of the cognitive approach is that it emphasizes mental
structure or organization. The argument is that human knowledge is organized
and that new input is interpreted in the light of this organization. Here thefieldis
especially indebted to Jean Piaget, the Swiss scholar who maintained that all
living creatures are born with an invariant tendency to organize experience, and
that this tendency provides the impetus for cognitive development.
Finally, the cognitive approach, in contrast to behaviorism, stresses the
notion that the individual is active, constructive, and planful, rather than a
passive recipient of environmental stimulation. For cognitive psychology, any
complete account of human cognition must include an analysis of the plans or
strategies people use for thinking, remembering, and understanding and
producing language.
It is important to note that these strategies are volitional, in that they can be
Applied Linguistics, Vol. 11, No. 2 © Oxford University Press 1990
114 RESTRUCTURING
adopted or not, at the discretion of the person. This does not mean, however,
that the person always exerts conscious control over which strategies are called
into action, nor does it mean that the person is capable of describing the
strategies in detail. For example, when engaged in conversation, speakers are
using strategies for understanding and producing sentences, yet if asked to
explain exactly how these strategies were being used, they would not be able to
do so. Using a computer analogy, we can say that speakers store programs
(strategies) in memory that enable them to understand and produce language.
They can execute these programs when they wish to do so, but are not able to
examine and report the details of the program.
In this paper I will discuss a cognitive psychological perspective to second

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language learning and the centrality of the restructuring process to under-
standing how individuals learn second languages.

SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING AS A COMPLEX COGNITIVE SKILL

Consider the following report of a schizophrenic patient:
I'm not sure of my own movements any m o r e . . . 1 found recently that I was thinking of
myself doing things before 1 would do them. If I'm going to sit down for example, I've
got to think of myself and almost see myself sitting down before I do it. It's the same with
other things like washing, eating, and even dressing—things that I have done at one time
without even bothering or thinking about at all... I take more time to do things because
I am always conscious of what I am doing. If I could just stop noticing what I am doing
. . . I have to do everything step by step now, nothing is automatic. Everything has to be
considered. (McGhie 1969)

Of course, this is a very dysfunctional situation. If we had to think through

ordinary activities before we did them, we would not be able to manage our lives
very well.
What we see in this patient is a breakdown in the automaticity that is so
important for normal functioning. We perform numerous complex tasks in our
daily lives automatically, without thinking about them. But this was not always
the case; we had to learn to perform the operations involved in these complex
skills by focusing attention on them. In his movie From Cup to Lip, the psychol-
ogist, Jerome Bruner, demonstrates how getting a cup to her lips is no small feat
for a seven-month-old infant. Later in life, learning to use a clutch or master the
backhand in tennis are tasks that require a great deal of attention—or what
cognitive psychologists call 'controlled processing'. After one has practiced the
task, components of these skills become automatic, and controlled processing is
required only in unusual cases. When you have been driving for many years, you
can carry on a conversation as long as no emergencies arise; but if you have to
drive on a very icy road, controlled processing is called into play and it is
difficult to keep a conversation going.
With enough practice, it is possible for people to carry out quite amazing
feats. In one experiment, after extended practice, subjects were able to read a
story aloud while writing down another story from dictation (Solomons and
 BARRY MCLAUGHLIN I 15

Stein 1896, cited in Howard 1983). In this case, presumably, reading had
become so automatic that the subjects could devote attention to the other task.
Note that cognitive psychologists see the same principles applying to complex
skills such as reading, writing, or learning a second language as apply in the case
of motor skills such as driving, typing, or playing tennis.
In short, within the framework of contemporary cognitive psychology,
complex cognitive skills are learned and routinized (i.e. become automatic)
through the initial use of controlled processes. Controlled processing requires
attention and takes time, but through practice, sub-skills become automatic and
controlled processes are free to be allocated to higher levels of processing. Thus

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controlled processing can be said to lay down the 'stepping stones' for automatic
processing as the learner moves to more and more difficult levels (Shiffrin and
Schneider 1977).
In this conceptualization, complex tasks are characterized by a hierarchical
structure. That is, such tasks consist of sub-tasks and their components. The
execution of one part of the task requires the completion of various smaller
components. As Levelt (1977) noted, carrying on a conversation is an example
of a hierarchical task structure (Table 1). The first-order goal is to express a
particular intention. To do this, the speaker must decide on a topic and select a
certain syntactic schema. In turn, the realization of this schema requires sub-
activities, such as formulating a series of phrases to express different aspects of
the intention. But to utter the phrases there is the need for lexical retrieval, the
activation of articulatory patterns, utilization of appropriate syntactic rules, etc.
Each of these component skills needs to be executed before the higher-order
goal can be realized, although there may be some parallel processing in real
time.
Note the importance, in this conceptualization, of practice. The development
of any complex cognitive skill is thought to require building up a set of well-
learned, automatic procedures so that controlled processes are freed for new
learning. From a practical standpoint, the necessary component is overlearning.
A skill must be practiced again and again and again, until no attention is
required for its performance. Repetitio est mater studiorum —practice, repeti-
tion, time on task—these seemed to be the critical variables for successful
acquisition of complex skills, including complex cognitive skills such as second
language learning.
Table 1: The hierarchical task structure of speaking

First-order goal: lo express a particular intention

Second-order goal:
Third-order goal:
Lower-order goals:
to decide on a topic
to formulate a series of phrases
to retrieve the lexicon needed
to activate articulatory patterns
to utilize appropriate syntactic rules
to meet pragmatic conventions

Based on Levelt 1977

116 RESTRUCTURING

This conceptualization, however, leaves something out of the picture, and

runs contrary to the experience of researchers in the second languagefield.As
one of these researchers put it in a 'state-of-the-art' paper:
Practice does not make perfect
Even though there are acquisition sequences, acquisition is not simply linear or
cumulative, and having practised a particular form or pattern does not mean that the
form or pattern is permanently established. Learners appear to forget forms and
structures which they had seemed previously to master and which they had extensively
practised. (Some researchers have referred to 'U-shaped development'.)
This author, Patsy Lightbown, went on to discuss some of her own research:

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Learners were—for months at a time—presented with one or a small number of forms
to learn and practise, and they learned them in absence of related contrasting forms.
When they did encounter new forms, it was not a matter of simply adding them on.
Instead the new forms seemed to cause a restructuring of the whole system. (Lightbown
1985:177)

RESTRUCTURING
These comments made sense, and helped clarify some puzzling data from a
study of second language reading (McLeod and McLaughlin 1986). The data
came from an analysis of errors that speakers of differing degrees of proficiency
in English made when reading aloud. We found that the errors that beginning
ESL students made were primarily nonmeaningful, which was seen to be due to
these students focusing on the graphic aspects of the text. That is, they would
make errors like She shook the piggy bank and out came some many (for
money); whereas native speakers were more likely to make meaningful errors,
such as She shook the piggy bank and out came some dimes .It was expected that
the proportion of meaningful errors for advanced ESL students would fall
somewhere between what was found for beginning ESL students and native
speakers. But instead, it was found that advanced ESL students, who had a
much superior grasp of the syntactic and semantic constraints of English (as
shown by their performance on a cloze test), made as many nonmeaningful
errors as the beginning students (Table 2).

Table 2: Group differences on dependent variables

Cloze test Proportion of
meaningful
errors
Group mean sd mean sd

Beginning
ESL 3.5 2.2 .20 .14
Advanced
ESL 6.8 2.4 .29 .17
Native
Speakers 9.7 0.6 .79 .17
 BARRY MCLAUGHLIN I 17

Research on learning to read in a second language suggests that there are at

least three stages:
1 First, the learner must master the rules governing symbol-sound correspon-
dences in the target language.
2 The learner must be able to use those rules in learning words and must
progressively refine and automate word-decoding operations.
3 Building on automated decoding skills, the learner must acquire and perfect a
complex set of processing skills that allows for rapid processing of incoming
material and the extraction of meaning.

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Beginning readers may have mastered the mechanical aspects of reading, but
continue to process the text word by word, not using contextual semantic
relations and syntactic information to comprehend meaning (Cromer 1970).
What was surprising was that more advanced learners in the McLeod and
McLaughlin (1986) study were apparently doing the same thing. Their errors
showed that they were not utilizing semantic and syntactic cues as well as they
could have. They were not approaching the task as 'a psycholinguistic guessing
game' in which graphic cues were used to make predictions about what the
printed text means, even though the evidence from the cloze test suggests that
they were quite capable of making such predictions. Their increasing syntactic
and semantic competence enabled them to make nearly twice as many accurate
predictions as the beginners on the cloze test, yet they did not apply this
competence to their reading behavior.
This suggests a process of restructuring had not yet occurred. What seemed to
be happening was that the advanced subjects were using old strategies aimed at
decoding, in a situation where their competencies would have allowed them to
apply new strategies directed at meaning. Their performance on the cloze test
indicated that they had the skills needed for "going for meaning'. Presumably
they read this way in their first language, but they had not yet made the shift
(restructured) in their second language. In this language, they did not make
strategic use of the semantic and syntactic knowledge at their disposal. Indeed,
other researchers obtained very similar results in second language reading
(Clarke 1979).

THE RESTRUCTURING CONCEPT

The concept of restructuring can be traced in the psychological literature to the
developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget. The Piagetian structuralist approach
maintains that cognitive development is an outcome of underlying structural
changes in the cognitive system. Just what constitutes structural change has been
a topic of some debate (see Globerson 1986; Karmiloff-Smith 1986). Suffice it
to say that there appears to be agreement that not just any change constitutes
restructuring. Restructuring is characterized by discontinuous, or qualitative,
change as the child moves from stage to stage in development. Each new stage
constitutes a new internal organization and not merely the addition of new
structural elements.
118 RESTRUCTURING

Recent concern with restructuring in developmental psychology reflects a

new emphasis on the dynamics of change and a reaction to what had become
known as the 'snapshot problem'. That is, developmental psychologists became
concerned that their knowledge of cognitive growth consisted of a series of
'snapshots' of the child's abilities at various points in development, but that they
knew little about how the child progressed from snapshot to snapshot. The
analogy in the field of second language research is the concern (expressed by
such authors as Hatch 1978; Huebner 1983; Long and Sato 1984) that there is
much known about linguistic products, but little known of the dynamics of
psycholinguistic processes.

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From an information processing perspective, restructuring can be seen as a
process in which the components of a task are coordinated, integrated, or
reorganized into new units, thereby allowing the procedure involving old
components to be replaced by a more efficient procedure involving new
components (Cheng 1985). To study restructuring is to focus on the mechan-
isms of transition that are called into play as the learner modifies internalized,
cognitive representations. Several examples of discontinuous change in the
linguistic development of the child illustrate this process.

Discontinuities in linguistic development

One developmental shift that has received considerable attention is the
transition from examplar-based representations to more rule-based representa-
tions. The classic example comes from morphological development, speci-
fically, the development of English irregular past forms, such as came, went,
broke, which are supplanted by rule-governed, but deviant past forms: corned,
goed, breaked. In time, these new forms are themselves replaced by the
irregular forms that appeared in the initial stage. This is an instance of the
famous U-shaped developmental curve.
Recently, this process has been discussed in detail by Karmiloff-Smith
(1986), who argued that children attack new problems by going through the
same recurrent phases. Phase 1 is the stage of automaticity and is data-driven;
components of the task are mastered, but there is no attempt at overall organiza-
tion. Organization is imposed at phase 2, when behavior is dominated by
'organization-oriented procedures', which result from the learner's attempts to
simplify, unify, and gain control over the internal representation. Phase 3
involves the integration of the data-driven, bottom-up processes that guide
phase 1 and the internally-generated, top-down processes that guide phase 2.
This integration results from the restructuring at work in phase 2, which, once
consolidated, can take environmental feedback into account without jeopardiz-
ing the overall organization.
As in morphological development, work on lexical development indicates a
similar movement from exemplar-based to rule-based representations. For
example, young children may consider age, appearance, and behavior to be
fundamental to the meaning of uncle, whereas older children will focus on
kinship definition even in the face of highly uncharacteristic features. Tradition-
 BARRY McLAUGHL/N 119

ally, this shift was thought to occur at a specific point in development and to
represent a general change in cognitive development (Vygotsky 1962). Recent
work by Keil and his associates (Keil 1983; Keil and Caroll 1980) indicates,
however, that the shift occurs at different times for different concepts, and is
determined primarily by the structures of the concepts themselves rather than
by a general transition from instance-bound knowledge to more rule-governed
knowledge. This work suggests that restructuring can be modular, in the sense
that development in one domain could look very different at a given point in
time from development in another domain.
An example of restructuring in syntactic development was reported by
Slobin (1987), who cited the case of an English-speaking child who had

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grammaticized a distinction that is not grammaticized in the English language.
The child used / and my as subjects of sentences, with the constraint that my
appeared in 'hot' emotional contexts, such as My like cookies, whereas / was
used in more neutral contexts, as in I like peas. Note that both subjects could
be used with the same verb. In time, of course, this way of marking hot
emotionality had to be abandoned as the child restructured his language to
conform to target norms.
Finally, the sudden discontinuous shifts that characterize the restructuring
process can be seen in the development of comprehension, specifically the
comprehension of metaphors. Recent research suggests that the ability to
comprehend metaphors depends on the organization of the relevant knowledge
needed to create metaphors—in particular, on the child's ability to juxtapose
semantic fields. Only after the relevant semantic fields are developed can the
child perceive metaphorical relations. Thus, young children are usually able to
perceive metaphorical relations between animal terms and automobiles (The
car is thirsty), but not between human eating terms and ways of reading a book
(He gobbled up the book), because in this second case the semantic fields are
not as well developed. Furthermore, research indicates that metaphorical
understanding does not develop gradually, but that whole classes of metaphors
become comprehensible all at once, as the sets of meanings that constitute
semantic fields are acquired (Keil 1983).

Mechanisms
Several mechanisms have been proposed to account for such transitional shifts.
Bowerman (1987) has distinguished two types of mechanisms: those that are
'off-line' in the sense that they occur without the child's awareness, and those
that require 'on-line' attention. Off-line processes involve covert review of the
existing repertory for regularities and exceptions. Thus forms that were
previously independent become linked through common rules (as in the
example of irregular verbs), or two words that were used interchangeably
become differentiated.
The explication procedure described by Karmiloff-Smith (1986) would also
involve off-line processes. Restructuring occurs because learners go beyond the
120 RESTRUCTURING

success of phase 1 and attempt to control and link previously isolated

procedures into a unified representational framework:
... my argument has been that the human organism (both linguistic and cognitive)
incorporates a drive to have control not only over the external environment (the input
stimuli) but also, and importantly, over its own internal representations and finally over
the intricate interaction between the two. (Karmiloff-Smith 1986:175)
Thus, in this view, once the procedures at any phase become automatized,
consolidated, and function efficiently, learners step up to a 'metaprocedural'
level, which generates representational change and restructuring.
More on-line processes occur when learners monitor their mistakes or

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encounter data that cannot be handled by their grammar. Thus discrepancies
become the impetus for new developmental change. The child acquiring syntax
might develop movement rules for negation and wh questions that are other-
wise adequate, but that require restructuring when the goal is to produce
negative questions.
From an information-processing perspective, the mechanisms of change
involved in restructuring result from the child's developing capacities. Thus in
the example of comprehending metaphors, the child's growing capacity to form
conceptually linked, and increasingly differentiated, semantic fields leads to the
revelation of new relations to other domains through analogies, similarities,
oppositions, and the like.
Nonetheless, it is clear that not enough is currently known about the
mechanisms involved in restructuring. Some authors stress the suddenness of
shifts in the learner's internal representations. Thus, the argument runs,
understanding the mechanisms of restructuring will best come about if attention
is given to changes that occur at the beginning and end of plateaus in develop-
ment (Globerson 1986). Other researchers note that structural changes can
occur in subtle and gradual ways and that evidence for restructuring might be
lost sight of if too much emphasis is put upon abruptness (Clark 1987).

RESTRUCTURING IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING

Turning now to the second language literature: What evidence is there for
restructuring and what does this process tell us about how people learn a second
language? This discussion begins by examining briefly evidence for restructur-
ing in syntactic and semantic development, and then turns to the role of strategy
shifts in restructuring.

Syntactic development
There have been a number of reports of discontinuities in second language
syntactic development that indicate restructuring. For example, Wode, Bahns,
Bedey, and Frank (1978) found evidence for the initial appearance of correct
irregular verb forms that are subsequently regularized to goed, corned, and the
like, before the correct forms reappear. Lightbown (1985) cited Hyltenstam's
(1977) work on the acquisition of the negative in Swedish as evidence that new
 BARRY MCLAUGHLIN I 21

forms were not simply added on, but caused a restructuring of the entire system.
Kellerman (1983) saw the acquisition of the English modal past form as an
instance of U-shaped behavior in Dutch second language learners. These
learners apparently go through a process of imposing Dutch structures on
English, which yields target-like and non-target-like forms, before they under-
stand and apply the English rule correctly.
One way of looking at syntactic restructuring is to view it as a transitional shift
that occurs between two stages in the process of form-function mappings. Ellis
(1985) has described these stages in the following terms. First, there is an
assimilation phase during which learners form hypotheses that may or may not
correspond to target language rules. This leads to a situation where two or more

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forms may be used in free variation. His example was the use of two negative
forms (no and don't) in free variation in both indicative and imperative
sentences. This is followed by a second stage, in which an economy principle
replaces the strategy of blanket assimilation, as the learner tries to maximize
linguistic resources by creating a system in which different forms serve different
functions. Unless alternative forms can be justified by allocating them to
different functions, redundant forms will be eliminated from the interlanguage.
For example, Ellis's learner used only don't in imperatives.
In the initial stage of this progression there is non-systematic variation
because new forms are assimilated that have not yet been integrated into the
learner's form-function system. Systematic variation occurs in the second stage
when the new forms have been accommodated by a restructuring of the existing
form-function system to give the new forms their own meanings to perform.
Eventually, learners restructure their knowledge until they sort out form-
function relationships (though some learners never reach this third stage).
Lightbown (1985) pointed out that second language acquisition is not simply
linear and cumulative, but is characterized by backsliding and loss of forms that
seemingly were mastered. She attributed this decline in performance to a
process whereby learners have mastered some forms and then encounter new
ones that cause a restructuring of the whole system:

[Restructuring] occurs because language is a complex hierarchical system whose

components interact in non-linear ways. Seen in these terms, an increase in error rate in
one area may reflect an increase in complexity or accuracy in another, followed by
overgeneralization of a newly acquired structure, or simply by a sort of overload of
complexity which forces a restructuring, or at least a simplification, in another part of
the system. (1985:177)

A good example of this type of restructuring is found in the work of Jurgen

Meisel and his colleagues (Meisel, Clahsen, and Pienemann 1981) on the
acquisition of movement rules in German by untutored immigrant workers.
These researchers found that passage through the developmental stages in
German word order involved a temporary deletion of elements previously
mastered. Thus learners would omit certain forms over which they had to move
other forms, such as object noun phrases, or would leave out categories to be
122 RESTRUCTURING

inverted, such as subjects or verbs. This apparent backsliding resulted from a

temporary restructuring of the system that involved a simplification of certain
elements to allow for the development of other elements.

Semantic development
In a recent article, Ard and Gass (1987) examined transitional developments in
the acquisition of structural patterns by second language learners. They
addressed the question of whether syntactic development can be reduced to
lexical learning in the sense that what may appear to be syntactic learning is in
actuality a matter of learning the structural frames into which lexical items can
enter. Their data suggest that syntactic patterns develop piecemeal, with

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learners acquiring lexical items as unique bits of language information. It is only
at later stages of development that lexical tadpoles are replaced by syntactic
frogs. Thus, in a general sense, development in a second language may involve
the interaction of lexical and syntactic processes, with restructuring occurring as
one or the other process predominates.
Within the lexical domain, development in a second language consists of
mapping two lexical and conceptual systems onto each other. Across two
languages words may roughly correspond in meaning, but few word pairs
completely overlap in all their lexical functions. Two languages may differ in the
number and nature of distinctions made within a common, shared concept or in
the linguistic distinctions made between semantic categories. In many instances,
a lexical item in the second language cannot be directly mapped onto a concept
existing in the first language, and the learner has to restructure existing first
language concepts or develop a new concept that corresponds to a lexical item
in the second language (Ijaz 1986).
An instance of such lexical restructuring comes from Kellerman's work
(1983). In this research Dutch university students and school children were
asked to judge the acceptability of English expressions involving break. Dutch
and English share both transitive and intransitive uses of break. Younger Dutch
learners of English accepted both uses, presumably because they are transfer-
ring from Dutch or responding to both uses in the L2 input. Older learners,
however, rejected English sentences exemplifying the intransitive use of break.
Thus more advanced learners are actually performing less well in judging the
acceptability of such sentences.
Kellerman argued that the reason for the decline in performance is that older
learners become sensitized to the pragmatic distinction between causative and
non-causative meanings of verbs such as break. Restructuring occurs as older
learners seize upon and manipulate what appear to be important functional
distinctions (such as the distinction between causative and non-causative verbs)
and attempt to give them distinct surface forms, rejecting forms where these
distinctions are not made. Younger learners, who have had less instruction and
are less sophisticated metalinguistically, are less likely to be aware of these
functional distinctions.
 BARRY MCLAUGHLIN 123
Strategy shifts
A common strategy adopted by young second language learners (and, perhaps
by more older second language learners than we realize) is to memorize
formulas (Hakuta 1976; Wong Fillmore 1976). Some children are capable of
amazing feats of imitation, producing multi-word utterances, which, it turns out,
they understand only vaguely. Such unanalyzed chunks appear to show
evidence of a sophisticated knowledge of the lexicon and syntax, but it has
become clear that such holistic learning is a communicative stategy that second
language learners use to generate input from native speakers (Wong Fillmore
1976).
Subsequently, formulas are gradually 'unpacked' and used as the basis for

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more productive speech. At this stage, the learner's speech is simpler but more
differentiated syntactically. Whereas utterances were as long as six or seven
words in the initial stage, they are now much shorter. The learner has at this
point adopted a new strategy, one of rule analysis and consolidation. The shift
from formulaic speech to rule analysis is another example of the transition from
exemplar-based representations to more rule-based representations.
Representational changes of this nature are the focus of one of the major
research enterprises of contemporary cognitive psychology, understanding
novice-expert shifts. As the name implies, the study of the novice-expert shift is
the study of the change that occurs as a beginner in some domain gains expertise.
Many domains have been studied—most extensively, expertise at chess, in the
physical sciences, in computer programming, and in mathematical problem
solving.
For the most part, these studies show that experts restructure the elements of
a learning task into abstract schemata that are not available to novices, who
focus principally on the surface elements of a task. Thus experts replace
complex sub-elements with schemata that allow more abstract processing. For
example, Chase and Simon (1975) replicated de Groot's (1965) finding that
Master chess players reconstructed with greater than 90 percent accuracy
midgame boards they had seen for only five seconds. They observed that Master
players recalled clusters that formed attack or defense configurations, whereas
beginners lacked the skill to form such abstract representations. McKeithen,
Reitman, Rueter, and Hirtle (1981) found that intermediate programmers
clustered the words of a programming language by concept, whereas novices
clustered the same words alphabetically. Strategy differences were also
reported by Adelson (1981, 1984), who found that expert programmers used
abstract, conceptually based representations when attempting to recall
programming material, whereas novices used more concrete representations.
In the domain of language learning, experts are those individuals who have
learned a number of languages. There is considerable anecdotal evidence that
once a person has learned a new language, subsequent language learning is
greatly facilitated. Presumably, there is some positive transfer that results from
the process of language learning and carries over to the learning of a new
language. Several studies bear on this hypothesis.
124 RESTRUCTURING

Nation and McLaughlin (1986) carried out an experiment in which they

compared information processing in multilingual, bilingual, and monolingual
subjects learning a miniature linguistic system. The goal was to see how 'expert'
language learners (multilingual subjects) compared in their performance with
more 'novice' language learners. Subjects were asked to learn a miniature
linguistic system consisting of letter strings under conditions in which they were
merely exposed to the system without instructions to learn it (Implicit learning),
or under conditions in which they were told that the system was rule-based and
they should learn the rules (Explicit learning).
Multilingual subjects were found to learn the grammar significantly better
than bilingual or monolingual groups when the instructions called for 'Implicit'

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learning, but not when the instructions called for 'Explicit' learning. Nation and
McLaughlin argued on the basis of their data that the superior performance of
the multilingual subjects on the Implicit learning task was the result of better
automated letter and pattern recognition skills.
In another experiment (Nayak, Hansen, Krueger, and McLaughlin (in press)),
subjects were exposed to a limited subset of permissible strings from an artificial
linguistic system. The goal in this study was to determine whether subjects could
apply generalizations derived from the learned subset to novel strings and if so,
what was the nature of these generalizations. In this experiment the linguistic
system involved a phrase structure grammar in which constituents were defined
by dependencies between words, as well as by regularities of substitution and
equivalence (Morgan and Newport 1981).
No differences were found between multilingual and monolingual subjects in
vocabulary or rule learning. The 'experts' were not better than the 'novices' on
these tasks, but there were differences in how the two groups went about the
tasks. In this experiment, half of the multilingual and the monolingual subjects
were told to memorize the material they were exposed to and half were told to
look for underlying rules. All subjects were asked at three points during the
learning phase to verbalize for another potential subject exactly what they were
doing and what strategies they were using.
Multilingual subjects were found to be more likely to use mnemonic devices
than linguistic strategies in the memory condition, but in the rule-discovery
condition, both groups of subjects preferred linguistic strategies to mnemonic
devices, although the difference was statistically significant only for the multi-
linguals (Table 3). In addition, multilingual subjects were found to use a wider
variety of different strategies in the rule-discovery than in the memory
condition, and no such differences were found for the monolingual subjects.
This suggests that one difference between more and less experienced language
learners relates to flexibility in switching strategies. This is consistent with the
research of Nation and McLaughlin (1986), who found that multilingual
subjects were able to avoid perseveration errors more than were other subjects
in their experiment. Similarly, Ramsey (1980) reported that multilingual
subjects demonstrated greater flexibilty in 'restructuring mental frameworks'
than did monolingual subjects.
 BARRY MCLAUGHLIN I 25

Table 3: Codings of subjects' verbalizations of strategies used in

learning phase (a)

Monolingual subjects Multilingual subjects

Memory Rule-discovery Memory Rule-discovery

Linguistic
strategies (b) 4.91 6.39 1.97 6.58
Mnemonic
devices (c) 4.79 3.33 7.47 2.94

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From Nayak, Hansen, Krueger, and McLaughlin (in press).
(a) Responses were coded by allotting 10 points per protocol to each of four
categories: structural, positional, verbal, and visual.
(b) Combining scores for structural and positional categories.
(c) Combining scores for verbal and visual categories.

Thus there is evidence to suggest that more expert language learners show
greater plasticity in restructuring their internal representations of the rules
governing linguistic input. This ability to exert flexible control over linguistic
representations and to shift strategies may result from 'learning to learn', in the
sense that experience with a number of languages may make the individual more
aware of structural similarities and differences between languages and less
constrained by specific learning strategies. More experienced learners may
more quickly step up to the metaprocedural level and weigh the strategies and
tactics they are using.
In the Nayak et al. study, expert learners did not surpass novice learners in
acquiring aspects of the linguistic system. This may have been because of limited
amount of time and exposure to the linguistic system. In the longer run, multi-
lingual subjects would be expected to perform better on vocabulary and rule
learning, precisely because of their superior ability to shift strategies and
restructure their internal representations of the linguistic system.

CONCLUSION
To summarize, the argument in this paper is that a complex cognitive skill, such
as acquiring a second language, involves a process whereby controlled,
attention-demanding operations become automatic through practice. This is
essentially learning through accretion, whereby an increasing number of
information chunks are compiled into an automated procedure. In addition,
however, there are qualitative changes that occur as learners shift strategies and
restructure their internal representations of the target language.
In this view, practice can have two very different effects. It can lead to
improvement in performance as sub-skills become automated, but it is also
possible for increased practice to lead to restructuring and attendant decre-
ments in performance as learners reorganize their internal representational
framework. It seems that the effects of practice do not accrue directly or
126 RESTRUCTURING

automatically to a skilled action, but rather cumulate as learners develop more

efficient procedures (Kolers and Duchnicky 1985). Performance may follow a
U-shaped curve, declining as more complex internal representations replace
less complex ones, and increasing again as skill becomes expertise.
Such a cognitive psychological description of second language learning
provides, none the less, a partial account, and needs to be linked to linguistic
theories of second language acquisition. By itself, for example, the cognitive
perspective cannot explain such linguistic constraints as are implied in marked-
ness theory or that may result from linguistic universals. These specifically
linguistic considerations are not addressed by an approach that sees learning a
second language in terms of the acquisition of a complex cognitive skill.

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(Received July 1988)

NOTE
This article is a revision of a paper presented at the Second Language Research Forum,
Honolulu, March 6, 1988. The author wishes to thank Jan Hulstijn and an anonymous
reviewer for helpful comments.

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