3 Psychological features of speech activity and learning foreign languages at various age stages
3.1 Personality and speech. Speech development at various age stages
The marvelous capacity for acquiring competence in one's native language within the first few years of life has been a subject of interest for many centuries. "Modern" research on child language acquisition dates back to the latter part of the eighteenth century, when the German philosopher Dietrich Tiedemann recorded his observations of the psychological and linguistic development of his young son. For a century and a half, few if any significant advances were made in the study of child language; for the most part research was limited to diary like recordings of observed speech with some attempts to classify word types. Not until the second half of the twentieth century did researchers begin to analyze child language systematically and to try to discover the nature of the psycholinguistic process that enables every human being to gain fluent control of an exceedingly complex system of communication. In a matter of a few decades, some giant strides were taken, especially in the generative and cognitive models of language, in describing the acquisition of particular languages, and in probing universal aspects of acquisition.
This wave of research in child language acquisition led language teachers and teacher trainers to study some of the general findings of such research with a view to drawing analogies between first and second language acquisition, and even to justifying certain teaching methods and techniques on the basis of first language learning principles. On the surface, it is entirely reasonable to make the analogy. After all, all children, given a normal developmental environment, acquire their native languages fluently and efficiently; moreover, they acquire them "naturally," without special instruction, although not without significant effort and attention to language. The direct comparisons must be treated with caution, however. There are dozens of salient differences between first and second language learning; the most obvious difference, in the case of adult second language learning, is the tremendous cognitive and affective contrast between adults and children.
This chapter is designed to outline issues in first language learning as a foundation on which you can build an understanding of principles of second language learning. A coherent grasp of the nature of first language learning is an invaluable aid, if not an essential component, in the construction of a theory of second language acquisition. This chapter provides an overview of various theoretical positions in first language acquisition, and a discussion of some key issues that are particularly significant for an understanding of second language learning.
Speech as psycholinguistic notion
Speech is one of the most complex forms of the highest psychological functions. The speech activity (SA) is characterized with the polysemy, the multilevel structure, the mobility and the communication with the rest psychological functions. An implementation of the speech activity is provided with the range of complex psychological mechanisms at all phases (levels) of its realization. These mechanisms were and they still are subjects of study for many psychologists and psycholinguists (74, 81, 95, 98, etc.). The most complete characterization of psychological mechanisms of speech activity (SA) is presented in researches of a national psycholinguistic school ("school by V.A. Artemov - N. I. Zhinkin - I.A. Zimnaya"). In researches by N.I. Zhinkin and I.A. Zimnaya, the holistic scientific concept of psychological mechanisms (PMs) of speech activity is presented. According to this concept, the main PMs of speech activity are: the comprehension mechanism of mnemonic arrangement of SA (first of all it's the mechanism of speech memory), also the mechanism of the predictive analysis and speech synthesis(the mechanism of the speech prediction or, what's the same, the prediction of speech). The most complete variant of this concept is reviewed in researches by I.A. Zimnaya, which is titled "Linguistic psychology of speech activity".
