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 MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES ON
INTERACTION

“Multiple Perspectives on Interaction is a fitting tribute to Susan Gass’s continuing

career which has involved multiple contributions to SLA theory and research over
the past three decades. Alison Mackey and Charlene Polio have assembled a strong
line-up of contributors to interactionist scholarship, one of several domains in
which Gass has long been a major force. This is a ‘research tradition’ in Laudan’s
terms, but as the theoretical discussions and empirical studies in this volume show,
one that is of increasing interest to scholars with a diverse range of positions on
SLA research methods and the proper scope of inquiry. The book is likely to be
of value to an equally broad range of readers.”
—Michael H. Long, University of Maryland
“This collection of research reviews, theoretical arguments, and empirical studies
truly lives up to its title. The many views of interaction that Susan Gass has
originated, acknowledged, and incorporated into her work are fully represented
throughout its chapters. Editors Mackey and Polio have brought together
world-renowned experts on psycho- and sociolinguistic, cognitive, affective, socio-
cultural, and pedagogical approaches to the study of SLA. Together, they lay out
their theoretical frameworks in ways that speak to Gass’s interaction approach and
draw from their own studies to support their points. In keeping with Gass’s
trademark clarity and accessibility, the chapters are written with elegance, studded
with citations, and brimming with tables, transcripts, definitions, and examples.
Their substance and scope reveal the extent to which Gass’s contributions on
input and interaction have continued to address SLA theory, expand its research
methodology, inform educational policy, practice, and technology, and challenge
the field toward new and necessary directions.”
—Teresa Pica, University of Pennsylvania
This collection in honor of Susan M. Gass focuses on interaction in second
language acquisition from multiple perspectives. It includes contributions
from many international experts in the field of SLA, providing new insights,
explanations, discussion, and suggestions for further research. This state of
the art volume provides an enriching discussion of how the interaction research
tradition is viewed in a wide range of different approaches to learning and teaching
second languages.
Alison Mackey is Professor of Linguistics and Head of the Applied Linguistics
Programs at Georgetown University, USA.
Charlene Polio is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Ger-
manic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages, and Director of the MA Program in
Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) at Michigan State
University, USA.
 MULTIPLE
PERSPECTIVES ON
INTERACTION
Second Language Research in Honor of
Susan M. Gass

Edited by Alison Mackey and

Charlene Polio
 First published 2009
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2009 Taylor & Francis

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or
other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Multiple perspectives on interaction : second language
research in honor of Susan M. Gass / edited by
Alison Mackey and Charlene Polio, – 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Second language acquisition. 2. Language and languages –
Study and teaching. I. Gass, Susan M. II. Mackey, Alison.
III. Polio, Charlene.
P118.2.M88 2009
401′.93—dc22

2008029473

ISBN 0-203-88085-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–8058–6458–X (hbk)

ISBN10: 0–203–88085–4 (ebk)

ISBN13: 978–0–8058–6458–8 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978–0–203–88085–2 (ebk)
 CONTENTS

Introduction 1
ALISON MACKEY AND CHARLENE POLIO
Georgetown University and Michigan State University

1 The Psycholinguistics of the Interaction Approach 11

NICK ELLIS
University of Michigan

2 A Variationist Perspective on the Interaction

Approach 41
ELAINE TARONE
University of Minnesota

3 Languaging in Collaborative Writing: Creation of and

Response to Expertise 58
LINDSAY BROOKS AND MERRILL SWAIN
University of Toronto

4 Creating Pressure in Task Pedagogy: The Joint Roles

of Field, Purpose, and Engagement within the
Interaction Approach 90
MARTIN BYGATE AND VIRGINIA SAMUDA
Lancaster University

5 Motivational Processing in Interactional Tasks 117

ZOLTÁN DÖRNYEI AND WEN-TA TSENG
University of Nottingham and National Taiwan Normal University

v
 CONTENTS

6 How Young is too Young? Investigating Negotiation of

Meaning and Feedback in Children Aged Five to
Seven Years 135
RHONDA OLIVER
Edith Cowan University

7 Interaction Research in Second/Foreign Language

Classrooms 157
NINA SPADA AND PATSY M. LIGHTBOWN
University of Toronto and Concordia University

8 Recasts in Multiple Response Focus on Form

Episodes 176
SHAWN LOEWEN
Michigan State University

9 Revealing the Nature of SCMC Interaction 197

BRYAN SMITH
Arizona State University

10 Interaction and Attention to Form in L2 Text-based

Computer-mediated Communication 226
LOURDES ORTEGA
University of Hawai’i

Epilogue: Exploring the Intricacies of Interaction and

Language Development 254
JENEFER PHILP
University of Auckland

Index 275

vi
 INTRODUCTION

Alison Mackey and Charlene Polio

According to Susan M. Gass, her interest in language learning was

sparked (or perhaps provoked) most intensely when, without any formal
background in language pedagogy, she found herself teaching Italian to a
lively assortment of thirty very different 6-year-olds, ranging from true
beginners to bilinguals. Sue, as she is widely known, had already been
quite interested in language for many years—as a high school student
living in Italy, as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley,
and as a graduate student at Middlebury College in Vermont, where she
completed an MA in Italian. But when she returned to Italy to work as a
teacher, she realized (despite, or perhaps because of, the rather tricky
nature of her teaching context) that language learning was something she
needed to understand better. Hence, it was back to California, where she
enrolled in the linguistics program at UCLA. There she completed her
MA and began coursework toward a Ph.D. Moving to the Midwest in
1975, she continued her studies at Indiana University, and, although no
courses in second language learning existed then, her interest in applied
linguistics was sparked through a course on language testing. And so it
began. Her dissertation on transfer and cross-linguistic universals in
second language acquisition was among the first to consider learners’
interlanguages as natural languages in their own right and SLA processes
as consistent across languages, that is, not simply the result of transfer-
ring particular habits. Her research, the results of which were published
in Language Learning in 1979, not only went beyond the current thinking
at the time, but also represented one of the first endeavors in this area
that genuinely applied linguistic theory. A natural next step for Sue, as
has been the case throughout her career, was to explore applications of
the theory to questions of effective pedagogy; she conducted an import-
ant classroom study (1982) which demonstrated learners’ ability to gener-
alize instruction from one type of relative clause to another, in effect
taking advantage of implicational relationships to go beyond what was
explicitly taught. Undeniably, her early work in applied linguistics was
groundbreaking for the field.

1
 A L I S O N M AC K E Y A N D C H A R L E N E P O L I O

Meanwhile, at UCLA, Evelyn Hatch was arguing for the importance of

studying input to and interaction with second language learners (Hatch,
1978a, 1978b; Wagner-Gough & Hatch, 1975). Hatch was suggesting
that second language learning developed from “learning how to carry on
conversations, learning how to communicate” (Hatch, 1978a, p. 63), and
her then-student, Michael H. Long, was beginning to explore native–
nonnative interaction theoretically and empirically. As part of his dis-
sertation work, Long documented the modifications to conversational
structure (e.g., repetitions, elaborations, clarification requests) that might
help to make language more comprehensible in interactions with non-
native speakers, challenging Stephen Krashen’s notion that comprehen-
sible input itself was necessary and sufficient for SLA to take place
(Long, 1981, 1983). Sue had not had the opportunity to study with
Evelyn Hatch while a student in the linguistics department at UCLA, but
she became interested in this early work on interaction when she was
researching and publishing in the areas of universals and processing
(Gass, 1982, 1984a, 1984b; Gass & Ard, 1980). In a move that was (and
has continued to be) typical of her career, she embarked upon a prolific
line of research in this new area.
For her first major contributions to interaction research, Susan Gass
collaborated with Evangeline Varonis, publishing several studies on
nonnative-speaker comprehensibility. In this research (Gass & Varonis,
1982, 1985; Varonis & Gass, 1982), they examined variables such as
familiarity with the topic of discussion and with nonnative accents, using
both naturally occurring and experimentally manipulated data to investi-
gate native speakers’ ability to understand learners’ speech. After propo-
sing an influential and often-cited model of negotiation in Varonis and
Gass (1985), she proceeded to explore variables still considered critical in
interaction research today, including task characteristics (Gass & Varonis,
1985), interlocutor and task familiarity (Plough & Gass, 1993), and gender
(Gass & Varonis, 1986). By this time, Sue had taken up a position in Ann
Arbor, near her hometown of Detroit, at the University of Michigan
and, together with Carolyn Madden in 1983, organized the tenth Confer-
ence on Applied Linguistics, entitled “Language Input: Learners’ Use
and Integration of Language in Context.” The purpose of the meeting
was “to develop a cohesive theoretical framework within which input
studies could be conducted” (Gass & Madden, 1985, p. v), and it resulted
in an edited volume that marked a significant turning point in the field.
In addition to several studies addressing various interactional processes,
it included Merrill Swain’s seminal (1985) paper arguing for the import-
ance of output, which has since become a vital part of the interaction
approach.
Susan Gass’s research, along with other work being done at the time
(e.g., Pica, Young, & Doughty, 1987), focused on describing interaction

2
 I N T RO D U C T I O N

and demonstrating how interactional modifications made language more

comprehensible. However, despite a large number of empirical studies
exploring the ways in which learners restructured their language produc-
tion toward greater accuracy and complexity during interactions, the role
of interaction in the actual internalization of L2 knowledge was not yet
clear (Sato, 1986), and researchers started to look for additional processes
that could make L2 forms salient and directly affect learning. In this con-
text, Gass and Varonis’s (1985) suggestion that instances of noncompre-
hension and concomitant negotiations for meaning could serve to focus
learners’ attention on problematic aspects of their interlanguage was an
important one. An innovative study, published by Gass and Varonis in
1994, was able to demonstrate that negotiation did have a positive influence
on learners’ language production in immediately subsequent interactions,
thereby planting the seed for other researchers to begin demonstrating
relationships with longer-term development. Thinking in a similar way in
the same year, and also pointing out that the link between negotiation and
acquisition had not yet been fully established, Teresa Pica (1994) outlined
a variety of ways in which negotiation might bring about helpful reformu-
lations and segmentations of language, contributing significantly to the
theoretical rationale for the benefits of negotiated interaction. Since then,
of course, many studies have investigated this link with mostly positive
results. (See Keck, Iberri-Shea, Tracy-Ventura, & Wa-Mbaleka, 2006 and
Mackey & Goo, 2007, for reviews.)
Over the past decade, Susan Gass has continued to conduct empirical
research that refines our understanding of the relationships among vari-
ous aspects of interaction and SLA, investigating, for example, how inter-
action can make learners’ speech more comprehensible to native speakers
(Polio & Gass, 1998), how learners perceive implicit feedback (Mackey,
Gass, & McDonough, 2000), how the effects of attention are related to
learning (Gass, Svetics, & Lemelin, 2003), how the ordering of input and
interaction can affect the learning of different areas of language (Gass &
Alvarez-Torres, 2005), how pre-service and experienced teachers perceive
interactions with nonnative speakers (Polio, Gass, & Chapin, 2006), and
how heritage and nonheritage learners perceive interactional feedback
(Gass & Lewis, 2007).
In addition to carrying out and interpreting the results of these empir-
ical studies, Susan Gass has also written extensively on the relationships
between the interaction approach and other theoretical approaches to
SLA. Drawing on her work on language universals, for instance, she has
stated that there is “nothing incompatible with arguments that language is
constrained by universals (innate or otherwise) and that language is
shaped by interactions” (Gass, 1997, p. 161); universals may limit learn-
ers’ choices regarding what is linguistically possible, while interaction
helps them to make those choices. Sue has also engaged with critics of the

3
 A L I S O N M AC K E Y A N D C H A R L E N E P O L I O

interaction approach who have suggested that cognitively based inter-

action approaches are not compatible with discourse-oriented approaches.
For example, she concluded a well-known commentary (Gass, 1998) by
arguing that it is possible to investigate language both as a social phenome-
non and as an abstract entity residing in the individual; these views of
language are not incompatible, but rather simply differ in focus. In gen-
eral, her perspective has been that SLA in fact must be interdisciplinary
in order to progress as a field, and she has repeatedly made a point of
outlining ways in which different research areas can be integrated through
a sharing of insights among theoretical, applied, psycho-, socio-, and neuro-
linguists, and, of course, language teachers and language professionals
(Gass, 1988, 1993, 1995, 2004).
In her (1988, 1997) multi-level framework Susan Gass applied this
interdisciplinary spirit to her own work where she tried to specify, for
example, which stages in the acquisitional process of converting apper-
ceived input into language production abilities might be more or less
influenced by affective as opposed to linguistic factors. In other lines of
work discussing interaction in a broader context, she has related inter-
action research to emergentist approaches by acknowledging that fre-
quency may affect how input becomes intake (Gass & Mackey, 2002).
More recently, in 2004, Sue examined data from the perspective of con-
versation analysis and showed that although the interaction approach
(being ultimately concerned with learning) does not focus on exactly the
same issues, it might benefit from some of the richness embodied in
conversation analysis transcripts. In a similar line of interest, she has
co-authored and co-edited several books and papers on interlanguage
pragmatics, discourse, and cross-cultural communication (Gass &
Houck, 1999; Gass, Madden, Preston, & Selinker, 1989; Gass & Neu,
1996; Houck & Gass, 1996, 1997). And, of course, Sue has taken pains to
lay out how language teachers can integrate theory and practice through
task-based approaches to language learning (Crookes & Gass, 1993a,
1993b) and how they can make use of SLA research in selecting and
evaluating classroom practices (Gass, 1995).
Finally, it would be impossible not to mention Susan Gass’s contribu-
tions to the field of SLA through her work on research methodology
(Gass, 1993, 1994, 2001; Gass & Houck, 1996), including three recent
books (Gass & Mackey, 2000, 2007b; Mackey & Gass, 2005). Her work
on methodologies in SLA, such as stimulated recall, has been hailed as
influential in encouraging other researchers to investigate learners’ per-
ceptions (e.g., Adams, 2003; Egi, 2007; Gass & Lewis, 2007; Mackey,
Gass, & McDonough, 2000; Nabei & Swain, 2002). Her critiques of
specific techniques, such as acceptability judgments (Gass, 1994) and
sentence-matching tasks (Gass, 2001), have highlighted important con-
siderations in using such methods. And in an article Sue wrote with

4
 I N T RO D U C T I O N

Charlene Polio a decade ago, they called for more uniformity and detail in
the reporting of research in the field across all methods and techniques
(Polio & Gass, 1997).
As recent overviews of the interaction approach have pointed out
(Gass & Mackey, 2006, 2007a), although the set of hypotheses associated
with interaction research are not claimed to constitute a complete causal
theory of SLA, they have evolved to become more theory-like (particu-
larly in combination), and are compatible with other theories. We have
attempted, in Figure I.1, to graphically represent the major tenets of
the interaction approach, as outlined by Gass and Mackey (2006, 2007a),
and as an introduction to the multiple perspectives represented in this
volume. This figure shows that social factors, such as motivation, can
affect learners’ access to feedback, input, and output. Furthermore, social
factors can cause learners to pay more or less attention to features of the
input. At the same time, a learner’s individual cognitive factors such as
developmental level and working memory can also influence the feed-
back, input, and output available to that learner. These cognitive factors
are central in determining the amount and type of attention that learners
pay to the feedback, input, and output that is available. These processes
may result in some type of learning, sometimes indicated by small
(not necessarily targetlike) changes in production or differences in

Figure I.1

5
 A L I S O N M AC K E Y A N D C H A R L E N E P O L I O

comprehension or awareness. Nevertheless, long-term changes as meas-

ured by delayed posttests, for example, are ultimately the best evidence
of learning.
All these developments have undoubtedly broadened the scope and
scale of our understanding of how interaction affects second language
acquisition. Interaction research has taken a tremendous leap from its
beginnings in the early 1980s to its current stage of maturity. Interaction
researchers today focus on complex, multifaceted aspects of interaction,
and L2 learning relationships. The current volume reflects and furthers
these current theoretical positions and research efforts, for which Sue’s
research has paved the way.
This volume represents an attempt to honor Sue’s work showing the
breadth and depth of the interaction approach, which represents one of her
most influential lines of research, particularly when viewed from multiple
perspectives. We begin with two theoretical chapters, both of which illus-
trate how the interaction approach is compatible with other theories and
approaches. Ellis discusses how cognitive, associative networks are regu-
lated by contextual factors, namely, interaction, and Tarone argues that
social factors influence attention, input, output, and feedback, as indicated
in Figure I.1, using empirical studies to convincingly support this idea.
These two theory chapters are followed by four empirical studies. First,
Brooks and Swain examine interaction in a collaborative writing task,
taking a sociocultural view of interaction. Next, two studies examine
tasks, an important component of interaction research in both dyads and
classrooms and, as mentioned above, another area where Gass made an
initial and significant contribution (Crookes & Gass, 1993a, 1993b). First,
Bygate and Samuda explore the concept of pedagogic tasks by evaluating
them with regard to communicative pressure, and then Dörnyei and
Tseng examine tasks with regard to a learner’s motivation to engage in
them. These studies are followed by a chapter where Oliver examines
features of interaction in a lesser researched group in SLA, young children.
She too discusses the influence of tasks on interaction.
The last four chapters examine interaction in specific contexts. Light-
bown and Spada review classroom-based research carried out within the
interaction approach and compare it to laboratory-based studies. Loewen
also examines interaction in the classroom by delving further into one
specific type of feedback, multi-move recasts. The last two chapters
extend the interaction approach to synchronous computer-mediated
communication. Smith examines how to best capture computer-mediated
exchanges to analyze within the framework of the interaction approach,
and Ortega finishes the empirical work in the book by reviewing recent
research in CALL and its relation to theories in the fields of communica-
tion and information and communication technologies, providing a truly
new perspective on interaction. We end the book with a commentary by

6
 I N T RO D U C T I O N

Jenefer Philp, who looks forward to future research, perspectives, and

implications of the interaction approach.
We have prepared a volume that showcases how interaction research
has matured and prospered since its inception, fostering examination of
various aspects of our understanding of how interaction facilitates L2
development. The research of Susan M. Gass is indisputably center stage
to this agenda. She laid an important foundation for this work, and has
made important contributions to every facet of the field. Research has
yet to achieve a complete understanding of what interaction can offer L2
learners and how interaction interacts with other factors to impact the
efficacy of interaction on L2 learning. We have no doubt that we will be
hearing more about this from Sue in the future.

References
Adams, R. (2003). L2 output, reformulation and noticing: Implications for IL
development. Language Teaching Research, 7, 347–376.
Crookes, G., & Gass, S. M. (Eds.) (1993a). Tasks and language learning: Integrating
theory and practice. Philadelphia, PA: Multilingual Matters.
Crookes, G., & Gass, S. M. (Eds.) (1993b). Tasks in a pedagogical context: Integrating
theory and practice. Philadelphia, PA: Multilingual Matters.
Egi, T. (2007). Recasts, learners’ interpretations, and L2 development. In
A. Mackey (Ed.), Conversational interaction in second language acquisition: A series
of empirical studies (pp. 249–267). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gass, S. M. (1979). An investigation of syntactic transfer in adult second language
acquisition. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana Universtiy.
Gass, S. M. (1979). Language transfer and universal grammatical relations. Lan-
guage Learning, 29, 327–344.
Gass, S. M. (1982). From theory to practice. In M. Hines & W. Rutherford (Eds.),
On TESOL ’81 (pp. 129–139). Washington, DC: TESOL.
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abilities in adult second language learners. Applied Psycholinguistics, 5, 51–74.
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language universals. Language Learning 34, 115–132.
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studies. Applied Linguistics, 9, 198–217.
Gass, S. M. (1993). Second language acquisition: Past, present and future. Second
Language Research, 9 99–117.
Gass, S. M. (1994). The reliability of second-language grammaticality judgments.
In E. Tarone, S. Gass, & A. Cohen (Eds.), Research methodology in second-
language acquisition (pp. 303–322). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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(pp. 3–20). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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Gass, S. M. (1998). Apples and oranges: Or, why apples are not oranges and don’t
need to be. The Modern Language Journal, 82, 83–90.
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ordering effect of input and interaction. Studies in Second language Acquisition,
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TESOL Quarterly, 14, 443–452.
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Speech acts across cultures: Challenges to communication in a second language. New
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Japanese-English. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
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research, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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AILA Review, 19, 3–17.
Gass, S. M., & Mackey, A. (2007a). Input, interaction, and output in second
language acquisition. In W. VanPatten & J. Williams (Eds.), Theories in second
language acquisition (pp. 175–199). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Gass, S. M., & Mackey, A. (2007b). Data elicitation for second and foreign language
research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Gass, S. M., & Madden, C. (Eds.) (1985). Input in second language acquisition.
Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Gass, S. M., Madden, C., Preston, D., & Selinker, L. (Eds.) (1989). Variation in
second language acquisition volume II: Psycholinguistic issues. Clevedon, Avon:
Multilingual Matters.
Gass, S. M., & Neu, J. (Eds.) (1996). Speech acts across cultures: Challenges to
communication in a second language. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Gass, S. M., Svetics, I., & Lemelin, S. (2003). Differential effects of attention.
Language Learning, 53, 497–545.
Gass, S. M., & Varonis, E. (1982). The comprehensibility of non-native speech.
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 4, 114–136.
Gass, S. M., & Varonis, E. (1984). The effect of familiarity on the comprehens-
ibility of nonnative speech. Language Learning, 34, 65–89.
Gass, S. M., & Varonis, E. (1985). Variation in native speaker speech modi-
fication to non-native speakers. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 7,
37–57.

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Gass, S. M., & Varonis, E. (1986). Sex differences in nonnative speaker—nonnative

speaker interactions. In R. Day (Ed.), Talking to learn: Conversation in second
language acquisition (pp. 327–351). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Gass, S. M., & Varonis, E. (1994). Input, interaction, and second language produc-
tion. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 16, 283–302.
Hatch, E. (1978a). Acquisition of syntax in a second language. In J. Richards
(Ed.), Understanding second and foreign language learning: Issues and approaches
(pp. 34–70). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Hatch, E. (1978b). Discourse analysis and second language acquisition. In E. Hatch
(Ed.), Second language acquisition: A book of readings (pp. 401–435). Rowley, MA:
Newbury House.
Houck, N., & Gass, S. M. (1996). Non-native refusals: A methodological perspec-
tive. In S. M. Gass & J. Neu (Eds.), Speech acts across cultures (pp. 45–64). Berlin:
Mouton.
Houck, N., & Gass, S. M. (1997). Cross-cultural back channels in English refusals:
A source of troubles. In A. Jaworski (Ed.), Silence (pp. 285–308). Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Keck, C. M., Iberri-Shea, G., Tracy-Ventura, N., & Wa-Mbaleka, S. (2006).
Investigating the empirical link between task-based interaction and acqui-
sition: A quantitative meta-analysis. In J. M. Norris & L. Ortega (Eds.),
Synthesizing research on language learning and teaching. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Long, M. H. (1981). Input, interaction, and second language acquisition. In
H. Winitz (Ed.), Native language and foreign language acquisition: Annals of the
New York academy of science, Volume 379, pp. 259–278.
Long, M. H. (1983). Linguistic and conversational adjustments to non–native
speakers. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 5, 177–193.
Mackey, A., & Gass, S. M. (2005). Second language research: Methodology and
design. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Mackey, A., Gass, S. M., & McDonough, K. (2000). How do learners perceive
interactional feedback? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 22, 471–497.
Mackey, A., & Goo, J. (2007). Interaction research in SLA: A meta-analysis and
research synthesis. In A. Mackey (Ed.), Conversational interaction in second lan-
guage acquisition: A collection of empirical studies (pp. 407–452). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Nabei, T. & Swain, M. (2002). Language awareness of recasts in classroom inter-
action: A case study of an adult EFL student’s second language learning.
Language Awareness, 11, 43–63.
Pica, T. (1994). Research on negotiation: What does it reveal about second language
learning conditions, processes, and outcomes. Language Learning, 44, 493–527.
Pica, T., Young, R., & Doughty, K. (1987). The impact of interaction on com-
prehension. TESOL Quarterly, 21, 737–759.
Plough, I., & Gass, S. M. (1993). Interlocutor and task familiarity: Effects on
interactional structure. In G. Crookes & S. M. Gass (Eds.), Tasks and language
learning: Integrating theory and practice (pp. 35–56). Clevedon, Avon: Multi-
lingual Matters.
Polio, C., & Gass, S. M. (1997). Replication and reporting. Studies in Second Lan-
guage Acquisition, 19, 499–508.

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Polio, C., & Gass, S. M. (1998). The effect of interaction on the comprehension of
nonnative speakers. The Modern Language Journal, 82, 308–319.
Polio, C., Gass, S. M., & Chapin, L. (2006). Using stimulated recall to investigate
native speaker perceptions in native-nonnative speaker interaction. Studies in
Second Language Acquisition, 28, 237–267.
Sato, C. (1986). Conversation and interlanguage development: Rethinking the
connection. In R. Day (Ed.), “Talking to learn”: Conversation in second language
acquisition (pp. 23–45). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Swain, M. (1985). Communicative competence: Some roles of comprehensible
input and comprehensible output in its development. In S. M. Gass &
C. Madden (Eds.), Input in second language acquisition (pp. 235–253). Rowley,
MA: Newbury House.
Varonis, E., & Gass, S. M. (1982). The comprehensibility of non-native speech.
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 4, 114–136.
Varonis, E. M., & Gass, S. M. (1985). Non-native/non-native conversation: A
model for negotiation of meaning. Applied Linguistics 6, 71–90.
Wagner-Gough, J., & Hatch, E. (1975). The importance of input data in second
language acquisition studies. Language Learning, 25, 297–308.

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 1
THE PSYCHOLINGUISTICS OF
THE INTERACTION
APPROACH 1

Nick Ellis

Second language acquisition (SLA) has been an independent research

discipline since the late 1970s, and Sue Gass has been a leading figure
throughout its evolution. The first issue of Studies in Second Language
Acquisition (SSLA) was published in 1978. Sue’s PhD thesis “An investi-
gation of syntactic transfer in adult second language acquisition” was
completed in 1979 and published as an article in Language Learning in
the same year. Second language acquisition: An introductory course (Gass &
Selinker, 1994) is for many the standard introductory text. Sue has been
associate editor of SSLA for longer than I can remember, an active
member of the American Association for Applied Linguistics since its
inception in 1977 (president in 1987), and is currently the president of
the International Association for Applied Linguistics (AILA). Sue’s
influence can be seen throughout the field. Yet, for me, her most pro-
found contribution is her program of research into the interaction
approach. It was Pit Corder (1967), a founding father of applied lin-
guistics, who famously identified the divorce of input from intake in
adult language learning. It was Mike Long in his PhD thesis Input, inter-
action, and second language acquisition (1980) who proposed that they may
be brought back together through interaction. Sue’s work over the last 20
years has persuasively realized the details of this reconciliation (Gass,
1997, 2002, 2003; Gass & Mackey, 2007; Gass, Mackey, & Pica, 1998;
Gass & Varonis, 1994; Mackey, 1999; Mackey & Gass, 2006).
There has been a sad but notable coolness too between first and second
language acquisition research on and off over this period. Perhaps SLA
felt a need to assert its new-found independence. Perhaps child language
research and psycholinguistics were too set in their ways, paying little
attention to their prior partner. Interaction approach research within
SLA has not had a marked impact upon mainstream psycholinguistics,

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as I believe it should have done. The two fields have independently been
recognizing the errors of their old ways and slowly opening up to new
influences, expanding their perspectives, and gaining richer under-
standings as a result. They have so much in common, they really should
get back together again.
A marriage counselor might turn to one of the partners at this point
and give them uninterrupted time to explain their perspective on things. I
believe this is what Alison Mackey and Charlene Polio intended by asking
me here to present a psycholinguistic perspective on the need for an
interaction approach, and I thank them for the opportunity.
I will begin with associative and cognitive accounts of language acquisi-
tion as the learning of form–meaning pairings, and connectionist analyses
of how linguistic generalizations emerge from the patterns latent in a
learner’s usage history. Let me call these foundations good old-fashioned
psycholinguistics (GOP) where, in caricature, the learner is an associative
network, a mechanistic processor of information, relatively unembodied,
unconscious, monologic, unsituated, asocial, uncultured, and untutored.
However incomplete an account, there is much of language and its acqui-
sition that is understandable in these terms. GOP is a necessary, but
insufficient, part of the language story. I will outline its utility. The
remainder of this chapter will then consider several limitations of GOP,
and how these necessitate the introduction of additional factors to a psy-
cholinguistic model of language acquisition. I sketch out what is incre-
mented at each iteration as we take this associative network and imagine
it: embodied in human form, perceiving the world accordingly, its cogni-
tion bounded by learned attention and its goals necessarily satisfied
rather than optimized (Simon, 1957), imbued with consciousness and
attentional focus, and dynamically situated in dialogue, its feedback, and
the social co-construction of form and meaning. Current child language
acquisition research emphasizes how language learning is “socially gated”
(Kuhl, 2004) in the same way that interaction approach research has per-
suaded SLA that “conversation is not only a medium of practice; it is
also the means by which learning takes place” (Gass, 1997, p. 104).

Language Acquisition as the Learning of

Form–Function Mappings
Saussure (1916) proposed that language comprises linguistic signs, the
signifiers of linguistic form and their associated signifieds, the functions,
concepts, or meanings. In such a view, language acquisition is the learn-
ing of mappings between form and function, and can be accordingly
investigated following domain-general approaches to human learning:
associative (the types of learning first analyzed within the behaviorist
tradition of the 1950s, e.g., for L1 Skinner [1957], for L2 Lado [1964]),

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cognitive (the wider range of learning processes studied within cognitive

psychology of the 1970s, including more conscious, explicit, deductive,
or tutored processes, e.g., for L1 Slobin [1992], for L2 McLaughlin [1987],
Andersen [1993]), and connectionist (the patterns and associations that
emerge from the statistical regularities in the summed experience of
form–meaning patterns, as explored in the parallel distributed processing
and competition model studies of the 1980s and 1990s, e.g., for L1
Elman [1990; Elman et al., 1996], for L2 MacWhinney [1987a, 1987b],
Ellis & Schmidt [1998]). The inheritors2 of these approaches as applied to
the domain-specific problem space of languages are current cognitive,
linguistic, and functional theories of language (e.g., for L1 Barlow &
Kemmer [2000], Croft & Cruise [2004], Langacker [1987], for L2 Robinson
& Ellis [2008b]), particularly Construction Grammar approaches which
view language learning as the learning of constructions (Bybee, 2007; Croft,
2001; Goldberg, 2003, 2006).

Construction Grammar
Constructions, the basic units of language representation, are form–
meaning mappings, conventionalized in the speech community, and
entrenched as language knowledge in the learner’s mind. They (a) may be
complex, as in [Det Noun] or simple, as in [Noun], (b) may represent
complex structure above the word level, as in [Adj Noun] or below the
word level, as in [NounStem-PL], (c) may be schematic, as in [Det Noun]
or specific, as in [the US]. Morphology, syntax, and lexicon are uniformly
represented in construction grammar. Constructions are symbolic: in
addition to specifying the utterance’s defining morphological, syntactic,
and lexical form, a construction also specifies the semantic, pragmatic,
and discourse functions that are associated with it. Constructions form a
structured inventory (Langacker, 1987) of a speaker’s knowledge, usually
described in terms of a semantic network, where schematic constructions
are abstracted over less schematic ones which are inferred inductively by
the speaker in acquisition. Consider the caused motion construction,
(e.g., X causes Y to move Z path/loc [Subj V Obj Oblpath/loc]). This
construction clearly exists independently of particular verbs, hence
the meaning of “Tom sneezed the paper napkin across the table” is
readily intelligible, despite “sneeze” being usually intransitive. Although
abstract constructions have schematic meaning like this, there is a close
relationship between the types of verb that typically appear within them
(in this case put, get, take, push, etc.), hence the meaning of the construc-
tion as a whole is inducible from the lexical items which have been
experienced within it.
Constructions are learned from language use, from engaging in com-
munication. Usage-based theories of language acquisition hold that an

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individual’s creative linguistic competence emerges from the collabor-

ation of the memories of all of the utterances in their entire history of
language use and from the frequency-biased abstraction of regularities
within them. Psycholinguistic analyses demonstrate that fluent language
users are sensitive to the relative probabilities of occurrence of different
constructions in the speech stream (Bod, Hay, & Jannedy, 2003; Bybee
& Hopper, 2001; N. C. Ellis, 2002a, 2002b; Jurafsky, 2002; Jurafsky &
Martin, 2000). Through experience, a learner’s perceptual system becomes
tuned to expect constructions according to their probability of occurrence
in the input.

The Associative and Cognitive Learning

of Constructions
The learner’s initial noticing of a new word can result in an explicit
memory that binds its features into a unitary representation, such as
phonological onset-rime sequence “wn” or the orthographic sequence
“one”. As a result of this, a detector unit for that word is consolidated in
the learner’s perception system which can subsequently signal the word’s
presence, or “fire”, whenever its features play out in time in the input.
Every detector has a set resting level of activation, and some threshold
level which, when exceeded, will cause the detector to fire. When the
component features are present in the environment, they send activation
to the detector that adds to its resting level, increasing it; if this increase is
sufficient to bring the level above threshold, the detector fires. With each
firing of the detector, the new resting level is slightly higher than the old
one—the detector is said to be primed. This means it will need less acti-
vation from the environment in order to reach threshold and fire the next
time that feature occurs. Priming events sum to lifespan-practice effects:
features that occur frequently acquire chronically high resting levels.
Their resting level of activity is heightened by the memory of repeated
prior activations. Thus our pattern-recognition units for higher-
frequency constructions require less evidence from the sensory data
before they reach the threshold necessary for firing.
The same is true for the strength of the mappings from form to inter-
pretation. Each time “wn” is properly interpreted as “one”, the strength
of this connection is incremented. Each time “wn” signals “won”, this is
tallied too, as are the less frequent occasions when it forewarns of “won-
derland”. Thus the strengths of form–meaning associations are summed
over experience. The resultant network of associations, a semantic net-
work comprising the structured inventory of a speaker’s knowledge of
their language, is so tuned that the spread of activation upon hearing the
formal cue “wn” reflects prior probabilities.
There are many additional factors that qualify this simple picture: The

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relationship between frequency of usage and activation threshold is not

linear, but follows the “power law of practice” whereby the effects of
practice are greatest at early stages of learning but eventually reach
asymptote. The amount of learning induced from an experience of a
form–function association depends upon the salience of the form and the
functional importance of the interpretation. The learning of a form–
function association is interfered with if the learner already knows
another form which cues that interpretation (e.g., Yesterday I walked), or
another interpretation for an ambiguous form (e.g., the definite article in
English being used for both specific and generic reference). A construc-
tion may provide a partial specification of the structure of an utterance,
and hence an utterance’s structure is specified by a number of distinct
constructions which must be collectively interpreted. Some cues are
much more reliable signals of an interpretation than others. It is not just
first-order probabilities that are important, it is sequential ones too,
because context qualifies interpretation, with cues combining according
to Bayesian probability theory: thus, for example, the interpretation of
“wn” in the context “Alice in wn . . .” is already clear. And so on.
Yet, despite these complexities, psycholinguistic research demonstrates
that a theory of language learning requires an understanding of the
associative learning of representations that reflect the probabilities of
occurrence of form–function mappings. Learners have to figure language
out: their task is, in essence, to learn the probability of an interpretation
given a formal cue in a particular context, a mapping from form to mean-
ing conditioned by context. This figuring is achieved, and communication
optimized, by learning mechanisms that are sensitive to the frequency,
recency, and context of constructions (Christiansen & Chater, 2001; N. C.
Ellis, 2002a, 2002b; Elman et al., 1996; MacWhinney, 1999).

Abstraction and Generalization

Memorization of previously experienced constructions is just the begin-
ning. Language involves more than the use of formulas, the economic
recycling of constructions that have been memorized from prior use
(N. C. Ellis, 1996; Pawley & Syder, 1983; Sinclair, 1991). We are not
limited to these specifics in our language processing. Some constructions
are a little more open in scope, like the slot-and-frame greeting pattern
[“Good” + (time-of-day)] which generates examples like “Good morn-
ing”, and “Good afternoon”. Others still are abstract, broad-ranging, and
generative, such as the schemata that represent more complex morpho-
logical (e.g., [NounStem-PL]), syntactic (e.g., [Adj Noun]), and rhetorical
(e.g., situation → problem → solution → evaluation) patterns. Usage-
based theories investigate how the acquisition of these productive patterns,
generative schema, and other rule-like regularities of language involves

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generalization from exemplars experienced in usage. The necessary gener-

alization comes from frequency-biased abstraction of regularities: exem-
plars of similar type (e.g., [plural + “cat” = “cat-s”], [plural + “dog” =
“dog-s”], [plural + “elephant” = “elephant-s”], . . .) resonate, and from
their shared properties emerge schematic constructions [plural + Noun-
Stem = NounStem-s]. Thus the systematicities and rule-like processes of
language emerge as prototypes or schema, as frequency-tuned conspir-
acies of instances, as attractors which drive the default case, in the same
ways as for the other categories by which we come to know the world.
Connectionist models of language acquisition investigate the representa-
tions that result when simple associative learning mechanisms are exposed
to complex language evidence. Connectionist simulations are data-rich
and process-light: massively parallel systems of artificial neurons use
simple learning processes to statistically abstract information from masses
of input data as generalizations from the stored exemplars. It is important
that the input data is representative of learners’ usage history, which is
why connectionist and other input-influenced research rests heavily upon
the proper empirical descriptions of corpus linguistics. Connectionist
simulations show how the default or prototype case emerges as the prom-
inent underlying structural regularity in the whole problem space, and
how minority subpatterns of inflection regularity (e.g., [past tense +
“swim” / past tense + “ring” / past tense + “bring” /. . ./ past tense +
“spling” = ?]) also emerge as smaller, less powerful attractors; less power-
ful because they have fewer friends and many more enemies, yet power-
ful enough nevertheless to attract friends that are structurally just like
them. Connectionist approaches to first and second language (Christiansen
& Chater, 2001; N. C. Ellis, 1998; Elman et al., 1996; Rumelhart &
McClelland, 1986), and competition model investigations of language
learning and processing (Bates & MacWhinney, 1987; MacWhinney,
1987b, 1997) investigate how regularities of form–function mappings
emerge from the patterns latent in the summed exemplars of language
usage, as sampled and described by Corpus Linguistics (Biber, Conrad, &
Reppen, 1998; Sampson, 2001; Sinclair, 1991).
In all of these investigations, it is clear that frequency of occurrence
is an important causal factor—frequency of form (N. C. Ellis, 2002a),
frequency and contingency of mapping (N. C. Ellis, 2006a, 2006b), fre-
quency of co-occurrence (N. C. Ellis, 1996; N. C. Ellis, Frey, & Jalkanen,
2007a, 2007b; N. C. Ellis & Simpson-Vlach, in preparation; N. C. Ellis,
Simpson-Vlach, & Maynard, in preparation), and type and token
frequency (Bybee & Hopper, 2001; N. C. Ellis, 2002a, 2008, in press;
N. C. Ellis & Ferreira-Junior, in press) with token frequency of instances
of a specific construction contributing to its entrenchment, routinization,
and speed of access in language learning and use; and type frequency, the
number of different instances which conform to schematic construction,

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contributing to its productivity, generalizability, and schematicity. These

effects of frequency are a clear testament to usage-based models of
language acquisition (N. C. Ellis, 2008c, 2006c). We learn language from
using language.
The foundations of GOP are laid. But the language learner in this
account is an associative network, a mechanistic processor of informa-
tion to be exposed to frequency-representative corpora of language. GOP
oversimplifies both the learner (as unembodied, unconscious, monologic,
autistic, unsituated, uncultured, asocial, and untutored) and the mechan-
isms of the interaction approach (Gass, 1997, chapter 5; Gass & Mackey,
2007; Gass & Varonis, 1994; Long, 1996; Mackey, 2007, in preparation)
which holds that what is important in interaction is not simply language
usage, but negotiation, with participants’ attention being focused on
resolving a communication problem and thus “connecting input, internal
learner capacities, particularly selective attention, and output in produc-
tive ways” (Long, 1996, p. 452). What of the rest? What of meaning,
embodiment, attention, consciousness, dialogue and dialectic, situated,
cultured, social and tutored interaction?

Cognitive Linguistics, Meaning, and Embodiment

First, the meaning pole of form–meaning associations—what of “mean-
ing”? While the above GOP-style analyses of the acquisition and process-
ing of linguistic signs explored meaning with atomic representations,
using either symbolic representations in artificial intelligence models
investigating spreading activation in semantic networks or production
systems (Dijkstra & de Smedt, 1996), or localist representations in con-
nectionist models (Christiansen & Chater, 2001), there is clearly a lot
more to meaning than that. Cognitive linguistics (Croft & Cruise, 2004;
Langacker, 1987, 2000; Robinson & Ellis, 2008b; Taylor, 2002) provides
detailed qualitative analyses of the ways in which language is grounded in
our experience and our physical embodiment, which represents the world
in a very particular way. The meaning of the words of a given language,
and how they can be used in combination, depends on the perception and
categorization of the real world around us. Since we constantly observe
and play an active role in this world, we know a great deal about the
entities of which it consists. This experience and familiarity is reflected in
the nature of language. Ultimately, everything we know is organized and
related to our other knowledge in some meaningful way, and everything
we perceive is affected by our perceptual apparatus and our perceptual
history.
Language reflects this embodiment and this experience. Consider, for
example, the meanings of verbs like push, shove, pull, hold, and so on, and
similar words from other languages. Theoretical understanding of the

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differences between these words cannot be forthcoming without inclusion

of a model of high-level motor control—hand posture, joint motions,
force, aspect and goals are all relevant to these linguistic distinctions
(Bailey, 1997; Feldman, 2006; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). These sensori-
motor features are part of our embodiment, they structure our concepts,
they play out in time.
Consider too the meanings of spatial language. These are not the
simple sum that results from addition of fixed meanings given by prep-
ositions for “where” an object is, to the meanings of other elements in the
sentence describing “what” is being located. Spatial language understand-
ing is firmly grounded in the visual processing system as it relates to
motor action (Coventry & Garrod, 2004; Regier & Carlson, 2002), the
multiple constraints relating to object knowledge, dynamic-kinematic
routines, and functional geometric analyses. Meanings are embodied and
dynamic (Spivey, 2006); they are flexibly constructed on-line. Meanings
like this cannot simply be taught by L2 rules and learned by rote; they can
only be learned in situated action.

Embodiment, Interaction, and Speech Perception

Next the form pole of form–meaning associations. Linguistic input is
embodied too. Speech is spoken by speakers, and we usually perceive it as
such, multimodally. The McGurk effect (McGurk & MacDonald, 1976)
is a classic demonstration of this perceptual phenomenon: when a video
of one phoneme’s production is dubbed with a sound-recording of a
different phoneme being spoken, the perceived phoneme is often a third,
intermediate phoneme. For example, a visual /ga/ combined with a heard
/ba/ is often heard as /da/. The effect is very robust; knowledge about it as
an illusion seems to have little effect on one’s perception of it. Thus
speech perception involves information from more than just the acoustic
modality.
This applies to language learning too. We do not usually learn language
from the airwaves; we learn to comprehend speech as spoken by speakers,
and there is considerable research demonstrating that we learn embodied
speech in social interaction more easily than we do the acoustic signals of
recorded speech.
Firstly, the effects of embodiment on the learning of the signal. Ani-
mated embodied speech provides a richer, more learnable signal (for
review, Massaro, Cohen, Tabain, Beskow, & Clark, in press). Hardison
(2002) found somewhat better learning of /r/ and /l/ by Japanese and
Korean speakers when training involved a frontal view of the talker than
simply auditory speech. Massaro and Light (2003) evaluated a computer
instruction system, Baldi, for teaching nonnative phonetic contrasts, by
comparing instruction illustrating the internal articulatory processes of

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the oral cavity versus instruction providing just the normal view of the
tutor’s face. Eleven Japanese speakers of English as a second language
were bimodally trained under both instruction methods to identify and
produce American English /r/ and /l/ in a within-subject design. Speech
identification and production improved under both training methods,
and generalization tests showed that this learning transferred to the pro-
duction of new words. Massaro’s work shows that the human face presents
visual information during speech production that is critically important
for effective communication and learning. While the voice alone is usu-
ally adequate for communication between fluent native speakers, visual
information from movements of the lips, tongue, and jaws enhance the
perception of the message for learners, both adults learning a second
language and L1 children with severe or profound hearing loss.
Secondly, the additional effects of social interaction. Kuhl, Tsao, and
Liu (2003) showed that infants older than 9 months could learn novel
phonetic discriminations from exposure to foreign language with contin-
gent social interaction but not from simple language exposure alone.
Nine-month-old American infants were exposed to Mandarin Chinese in
twelve 25-minute live or televised sessions. After exposure, infants in the
Mandarin exposure groups and those in the English control groups were
tested on a Mandarin phonetic contrast using a head-turn technique.
Children in the live exposure group showed phonetic learning whereas
those in TV- or audio-only groups did not.
Infant-directed speech (or “motherese”) might assist infants in learning
speech sounds because of social scaffolding and the capture of the child’s
attention by the adult, but also because it exaggerates relevant features
and contrasts in the input.
Evidence for the effects of social feedback and interactional synchrony
upon the quantity and quality of utterances of young infants comes
from Goldstein, King, and West (2003). Mothers’ responsiveness to their
infants’ vocalizations was manipulated after a baseline period of normal
interaction: Half of the mothers were instructed to respond immediately
to their infants’ vocalizations by smiling, moving closer to, and touching
their infants: these were the “contingent condition” (CC) mothers. The
other half of the mothers were “yoked controls” (YC) in that their reac-
tions were identical, but timed (by the experimenter’s instructions) to
coincide with vocalizations of infants in the CC group. Infants in the CC
group produced more vocalizations than infants in the YC group, and
their vocalizations were more mature and adult-like.
There is substantial evidence that “motherese” provides input that is
exaggerated in perceptually relevant ways. Fernald and Kuhl (1987) showed
that, when compared to adult-directed speech, infant-directed speech is
slower, has a higher average pitch, and contains exaggerated pitch con-
tours. In a cross-linguistic study, Kuhl. (1997) performed acoustic analyses

19
 NICK ELLIS

of English, Russian, and Swedish women when they spoke to another

adult or to their young infants to show that vowel sounds (the /i/ in “see”,
the /a/ in “saw” and the /u/ in “Sue”) in infant-directed speech were
more clearly articulated. Women from all three countries exaggerated the
acoustic components of vowels, “stretching” the formant frequencies, in
infant-directed, as opposed to adult-directed, speech. This acoustic
stretching makes the vowels contained in “motherese” more distinct, and
this additional speech clarity in turn aids learner speech discrimination—
mothers who stretched their vowels to a greater degree had infants
who are better able to hear subtle distinctions in speech (Liu, Kuhl, &
Tsao, 2003).
Thus infant-directed speech has three main roles: it attracts atten-
tion through higher pitch, it conveys emotional affect, and it conveys
language-specific phonological information through vowel hyperarticula-
tion. Recent research shows that foreigner directed speech (FDS), the
speech natives direct at nonnative learners, likewise promotes speech
clarity. Knoll and Uther (2004) compared British English speech directed
to first language English learners (infants), and to second language English
learners (adult foreigners) as populations with similar linguistic but dis-
similar affective needs. Their analyses showed that vowels were equiva-
lently hyperarticulated in infant- and foreigner-directed speech, but that
pitch was higher in speech to infants than to foreigners or adult British
controls and that positive affect was highest in infant-directed and lowest
in foreigner-directed speech. They conclude that there are linguistic
modifications in both infant- and foreigner-directed speech that are didac-
tically oriented, and these linguistic modifications are independent of
vocal pitch and affective valence. In a parallel study comparing the acous-
tics of real and imaginary foreigner-directed speech, Scarborough, Olga,
Hall-Lew, Zhao, and Brenier (2007) showed that speakers adjusted their
conversational tempo according to the status of their listeners, talking
more slowly to foreigners than to native speakers and producing longer
vowels. Thus FDS is an acoustically distinct speech style from standard
native-directed speech and its adjustments are consistent with those seen
in other listener-directed speech styles: speakers produce a signal that is
clearer and easier to process when speaking to listeners who may have had
extra processing difficulties due to limited language experience. In these
ways the input to the form layer of the associative network is socially
gated (Gass, 1997, chapter 3).

Communicating Meaning—Referential Indeterminacy

and Intention Reading
Meaning is an essentially individual and private phenomenon; another’s
cognition and consciousness is internal and unseeable. So how can a

20
T H E P S YC H O L I N G U I S T I C S O F T H E I N T E R A C T I O N A P P RO A C H

language learner come to intuit the meanings and intentions of a conver-

sation partner, thus to determine the mappings between language form
and meaning? Even when the learner shares the “here and now”, the same
physical context, with an animated and constructive conversation part-
ner, even then, as Quine (1960) demonstrated with his “gavagai” parable,
referential indeterminacy is a fundamental problem. Single words cannot
simply be paired with experiences because they confront experience in
clusters. Consider a learner of English, child or adult, on a country walk
while their conversation partner whispers, “I wonder if we’ll see some
gavagai today.” The learner’s reasoning about the meaning of “gavagai” is
likely constrained by the constructions they know, their knowledge of
grammatical categories and frames (Brent, 1994; Gleitman, 1990; Maratsos,
1982; Tomasello, 2003), and thus processes of syntactic bootstrapping
(Gleitman, 1990) might suggest that “gavagai” is a noun. But what is the
referent? They might look up to see across a field an animal hopping close
to a ditch . . ., mushrooms, cowpats, acorns, long grass, thistles . . . a rich
and complex scene. And just what might “gavagai” be? Other things being
equal, a good bet might be to translate the word as “rabbit”, this search
for the correct referent being speeded by various attention-focusing gen-
eral word-learning heuristics: the tendency to believe (1) that new words
often apply to whole objects (the whole object constraint), (2) that they
more likely refer to things for which a name is not already known (the
mutual exclusivity constraint), (3) that they more often relate to things
distinguished by shape or function rather than by color or texture, and
the like (Bloom, 2000; Golinkoff, 1992; Golinkoff, Mervis, & Hirsh-
Pasek, 1994; Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997; Markman, 1989). These all help.
But there is no one clearly correct interpretation; it could be that “gava-
gai” actually refers to “fluffy cotton tail,” or “long ears,” or “softness,” or
“undetached rabbit-part,” given that any experience that makes the use of
“rabbit” appropriate makes these other meanings appropriate too. Refer-
ential indeterminacy entails that the learner can only make a guess at the
intended meaning. The quality of the guess is determined by the quality
of the conversational interaction, the degree to which the conversation
partner makes things clear, by pointing, with eyes, gesture, or language,
and the degree to which speaker and listener negotiate meaning.
Reading the interlocutor’s intention in dyadic situated interaction is
therefore key in the acquisition of L1. Over the first two years of life,
infants develop their capabilities of attention detection (gaze following),
attention manipulation (directive pointing), intention understanding (the
realization that others are goal-directed), and social coordination with
shared intentionality (engaging in joint activities with shared interest,
negotiating meanings), and there is considerable current research focusing
upon the centrality of these processes in child language acquisition
(Tomasello, 1999, 2001; Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll,

21
 NICK ELLIS

2005). Traditional GOP took little account that the associative network is
gated by social gaze and joint attention (Emery, 2000). However, there
are now the beginnings of computational simulations of word learning
which examine the influence of inferring interlocutors’ referential inten-
tions from their body movements at early stages of lexical acquisition. By
testing human participants and comparing their performances in different
learning conditions, Chen, Ballard, and Aslin (2005) demonstrated that
embodied intentions facilitate both word discovery and word–meaning
association and present a computational model that can identify the
sound patterns of individual words from continuous speech, using non-
linguistic contextual information, and employ eye movements as deictic
references to discover word–meaning associations. This is the first model
of word learning that not only learns lexical items from raw multisensory
signals to closely resemble infant language development from natural
environments, but also explores the computational role of social cognitive
skills in lexical acquisition.
Analyses of classroom, mother–child, and native speaker (NS)–NNS
interactions demonstrate how conversation partners scaffold the acquisi-
tion of novel vocabulary and other constructions by focusing attention
on perceptual referents or shades of meaning and their corresponding
linguistic forms (Baldwin, 1996; Chun, Day, Chenoweth, & Luppescu,
1982; R. Ellis, 2000; Gass, 1997; Gelman, Coley, Rosengren, Hartman, &
Pappas, 1998; Long, 1983; Oliver, 1995; Tomasello, 1999; Tomasello &
Akhtar, 2000). The interlocutor has various means of making the input
more comprehensible: (a) by modifying speech, (b) by providing linguistic
and extralinguistic context, (c) by orienting the communication to the
“here and now”, and (d) by modifying the interactional structure of the
conversation (Long, 1982). Learners search for meanings, and their con-
versation partners, as language tutors, try to spotlight the relevant alterna-
tives: “notice this,” they say in their deictic words and actions. Socially
scaffolded “noticing” (Schmidt, 1990, 1993, 2001) solves Quine’s (1960)
problem of “referential indeterminacy.” In these ways the input to the
meaning layer of the associative network is socially gated.

Embodiment, Interaction, and Language

Understanding—Construal and Attention
But language does more than select out particular things in the world.
Constructions are conventionalized linguistic means for presenting dif-
ferent interpretations or construals of an event. They structure concepts
and window attention to aspects of experience through the options spe-
cific languages make available to speakers (Talmy, 2000a, 2000b). The
different degrees of salience or prominence of elements involved in situ-
ations that we wish to describe affect the selection of subject, object,

22
T H E P S YC H O L I N G U I S T I C S O F T H E I N T E R A C T I O N A P P RO A C H

adverbials, and other clause arrangement. Figure/ground segregation and

perspective taking, processes of vision and attention, are mirrored in
language and have systematic relations with syntactic structure. Thus
a theory of language must properly reflect the ways in which human
vision and spatial representations are explored, manipulated, cropped,
and zoomed, and run in time like movies under attentional control. In
language production, what we express reflects which parts of an event
attract our attention; depending on how we direct our attention, we can
select and highlight different aspects of the frame, thus arriving at differ-
ent linguistic expressions. The prominence of particular aspects of the
scene and the perspective of the internal observer (i.e., the attentional
focus of the speaker and the intended attentional focus of the listener)
are key elements in determining regularities of association between elem-
ents of visuo-spatial experience and elements of phonological form. In
language comprehension, abstract linguistic constructions (like simple
locatives, datives, and passives) serve as a “zoom lens” for the listener,
guiding their attention to a particular perspective on a scene while back-
grounding other aspects (Croft, 2001; Croft & Cruise, 2004; Langacker,
1987, 1999; Taylor, 2002).
Embodiment and social interaction are crucial to the learner’s realiz-
ation of the intended construals of situations, and hence of the proper
interpretations of linguistic signs. In a speech situation, a hearer may
attend to the linguistic expression produced by a speaker, to the con-
ceptual content represented by that expression, and to the context at
hand. But not all of this material appears uniformly in the foreground
of the hearer’s attention. Rather, various portions or aspects of the
expression, content, and context have different degrees of salience. Such
differences are only partly due to any intrinsically greater interest of
certain elements over others. More fundamentally, language has an exten-
sive system that assigns different degrees of salience to the parts of an
expression, reference, or context. Talmy (2000a, 2000b) analyzes how the
attentional system of language includes some fifty basic factors, its “build-
ing blocks.” Each factor involves a particular linguistic mechanism that
increases or decreases attention on a certain type of linguistic entity.
Although able to act alone, the basic factors also regularly combine and
interact to produce further attentional effects. Thus, several factors can
converge on the same linguistic entity to reinforce a particular level of
salience, making it especially high or especially low. Or two factors can
conflict in their attentional effects, with the resolution usually being
either that one factor overrides the other, or that the hearer’s attention
is divided or wavers between the two claims on it. Or a number of fac-
tors can combine in the production of higher-level attentional patterns,
such as that of figure-ground assignment, or that of maintaining a single
attentional target through a discourse. Learning a language involves the

23
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