The Psychological Basis of Contrastive Analysis

The Psychological Basis
of
Contrastive Analysis
By :
Zahra Aamir Kamil

 learning the Highway Code means learning to
associate the visual sensation of a red light
with the need to stop the vehicle. Also a child
feels thirsty (this is stimulus ), it will respond
by saying ' milk' (this is respond ), it well be
reinforced by a glass of milk, this is (
Reinforcement).
 The study of this process constitutes
Associationism in psychology. a study dating
back at least to Aristotle, though Galton was
the first modern psychologist to study
associations experimentally.

 Thus learning is a psychological association
which is a theory tries to explain how items are
combined together in the mind to produce
thought and leaning, for example , identifying
pictures with what they really represent is a
mental process developed through association .
So the psychological basis of CA resides in the
two psychological enterprises we have
mentioned: Associationism and S-R theory.
 CA has a psychological basis because CA is
founded on the assumption that L2 learners
will tend to transfer to their L2 utterances the
formal features of their first language L1.

 The experimental investigation of transfer
undertaken by psychologists concerned
very primitive learning tasks performed -
frequently by animals under laboratory
conditions. Where the intention was to
study language learning by humans, the
tasks were similarly very much simplified
in comparison with the real-world
processes of language learning: the
favoured technique was (and still is) the
learning of sets of nonsense-syllables.

One defence of such extrapolation is
that a fundamental assumption of
the philosophy of science is that it is,
and it is on this basis that progress
is made in science.

Secondly, there is evidence of a strong link
between experimental and real-life learning, as
far as transfer is concerned. This was
recognized by Underwood (1957) and by
Underwood and Postman (1960). Furthermore,
the study of bilingualism corroborates many of
the experimental findings concerning transfer
effects. Thus Weinreich is able to write of
interference as "... those instances of deviation
from the norms of either language which occur
in the speech of bilinguals as a result of their
familiarity with more than one language"
(Weinreich, 1953: 1). There remain,
nevertheless, certain differences and certain
problems, which deserve some attention.

 Some Problems of Definition
 In conditioning ,the responses are assumed
to be available to the learner, already part of
his repertoire. They just need to be learnt in
the association of stimuli .
 CA is concerned with teaching rather than
learning. The former ‘teaching’ involves the
predetermination and conventionalisation of
what stimuli and responses are to be
associated, whereas the latter ‘learning’ is a
set of decisions that can be quite arbitrary.

 Transfer Theory and CA
 CA is founded on the assumption that L2
learners will tend to transfer to their L2
utterances the formal features of their L1.
that, as Lado puts it "individuals tend to
transfer the forms and meanings and the
distribution of forms and meanings of their
native language and culture to the foreign
language and culture" (lado. 1957, P. 2).
 Osgood (1949) summarized two decades of
research into the phenomenon of transfer in
the three 'paradigms'.

Osgood put three learning tasks being set in
sequence. In fact, there are only two learning
tasks, not three: 'task 3' is in reality a
performance task. However, task 1 and task 2
are called ‘Proaction', while task 3 is called '
Retroaction‘.
Proaction: the effect of a given specifiable prior
activity upon the learning of a given test
activity .
Retroaction: is concerned with the effect of a

Proaction: the effect of a given
specifiable prior activity upon the
learning of a given test activity .
Retroaction is concerned with the
effect of a specifiable interpolated
activity upon the retention of a
previously learned activity .

CA is concerned with Proaction of course, seeing
'task 1' as the learning of L1, and 'task 2' as the
learning of L2.
Retroaction is of potential interest to CA in two
ways:
First, it could handle effects of L2 upon
performance in L1, or what Jakobovits (1969)
vividly terms 'backlash'.

Secondly, it is concerned with forgetting, or
'oblivescence', as Baddeley (1972, P. 41)
observed.
It would have to be invoked in any attempt to
explain why LI is not usually forgotten when a
L2 is learnt. Here, we shall only be concerned
with Proaction.

 CA and Behaviourist Learning Theory
Coder ( 1971), tries to explain the reason of committing
L2 errors due to the previous experience, the learner
gets from his mother tongue and tries to impose them
into the second language learning .
This view, to a great extent support the assumption that
language is a sort of habit-structure as behaviotists
regard it. So , the S. R. (Behaviourist Theory) of
psychology proposed by B.F Skinner is a transfer in
which the errors committed by the learner are about
carrying over the habits of his mother into L2 .

 A Scale of Difference
 Maximum difference of Rs in L1 and L2.
 - Polish / German are difer in word order .
 Partial similarity of Rs
 In Polish , the particle is located initially in a
sentence
 In Japanese the particle is located finally in a
sentence
 greatest similarity (or identity) of Ss and
Rs in L1 and L2.

CA and Behaviourist Learning Theory
Ignorance-without-interference
Interference-without-ignorance
Three major weaknesses of ignorance hypothesis
Ignorant by self-evaluation
It is possible for different learners to be equally ignorant
of a given L2 structure
Learner knowledge about L2 structure

The Psychological Basis of Contrastive Analysis

The Psychological Basis of Contrastive Analysis

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The Psychological Basis of Contrastive Analysis