Competition Model - Theoretical Components - Language Acquisition

Language Acquisition

More recently, the Competition Model has been developed into a unified theory of first and second language acquisition. Its scope has been expanded to account for a number of psycholinguistic processes involved in language acquisition, including arenas, cues, storage, chunking, codes, and resonance. The expanded version of the Competition Model posits that each of these cognitive mechanisms controls the activation of representations in the target language (and, in the case of second language learners, the native language) that compete in the mind of the learner during acquisition and usage of the language. As in the original version of the model, the weights of the competing representations are computed and adjusted on the fly based on the learner's experience with the target language. Thus, the model infers that as the extensiveness of learners' exposure to the target language increases, they will gain an increasingly complete and nuanced understanding of the meaning of sentences in the target language.