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COMPETITION MODEL

المؤلف:  John Field

المصدر:  Psycholinguistics

الجزء والصفحة:  P68

2025-08-09

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COMPETITION MODEL

A model of the way in which syntactic processing is influenced by the nature of the language in question. The hypothesis is that speakers of different languages rely on different syntactic cues in constructing meaning. There are four possible cues: word order, world knowledge, animacy and morphology. The cue strengths (the degree to which a listener is influenced by each of these criteria) reflect the nature of the listener’s language– in particular, how rigid its word order is. Thus, in processing an utterance in Italian such as:

English speakers are said to be very dependent upon word order, while Italian speakers place greater reliance on morphology and animacy.

In acquiring a second language, cue strengths from L1 appear to be transferred. Thus, English learners of Japanese employ rigid word order cues based on the standard Subject-Object-Verb pattern of the target language, and fail to recognise that it is more flexible than  English. The competition between L1 and L2 values leads second language learners firstly to apply the values of L1 and then to fall back on semantic (world knowledge) criteria. Part of the process of acquiring a second language is said to be a gradual adjustment to the cue strengths appropriate to that language.

Further reading: Bates and MacWhinney (1982); Gass and Selinker (1994: 139–44)