Face to Face With the Ghost in the

Machine: Psycholinguistics and TESOL

JOHN FIELD
University of Reading
Reading, England

WHAT DOES PSYCHOLINGUISTICS TELL US?

P sycholinguistics is the study of how the mind handles language.

There is some lack of consensus as to how far the scope of the field
extends, but this special issue of TESOL Quarterly focuses on its most
central concerns, namely, how language is acquired, how it is stored in
the mind, and how it is processed in use.
Findings from psycholinguistics are relevant to TESOL in several ways.
Most obviously, there is a growing body of research into the psychology
of second language acquisition. Researchers have investigated how learn-
ers construct a new language system alongside an existing one (Schwartz
& Kroll, 2006). Established concepts from cognitive psychology have
been invoked to shed light on the challenges faced by second language
(L2) users (Robinson, 2001). There has been particular interest in how
bilinguals coordinate their two language systems (Dijkstra & Van Heu-
ven, 1998) and in how the first language (L1) suffers attrition when the
second becomes the dominant one (Hansen, 2001).
Research into L1 performance also makes an important contribution.
On the one hand, it provides insights into language as a general phe-
nomenon. All language users, whatever their L1, have to deal with the
forms in which language is transmitted: They all have, for example, to
assemble speech under pressure of time or to use sweeps of the eye to
read printed text. All human beings share a similar brain configuration,
and it is reasonable to suppose that any language maps on to the opera-
tions for which the brain is best fitted (Deacon, 1997, pp. 115–116). On
the other hand, we can also learn from research into processes specific
to the L1, which serves to identify routines that the L2 user needs to
acquire. It is useful to know, for example, that listeners to English use
lexical stress to work out where words begin and end (Cutler, 1990);
those who do not use this technique in their L1 will need to adjust to it.
Note that the line of argument here is not that the L2 learner must
slavishly imitate the native user, but simply that years of exposure to
English have enabled the native user to evolve the most efficient ways of
producing and making sense of the language.

TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 42, No. 3, September 2008 361

 At this juncture, some clarification is called for. The impression may
have been given that psycholinguistic enquiry is heavily normative and
fails to provide for the diversity of language users and contexts of use.
Psycholinguists do indeed aim to identify the processes which underlie
language performance in general, but they also recognize that the pro-
cesses in question will vary from person to person and from situation to
situation. For example, cognitive models of L1 and L2 reading recognise
that the way in which a text is read will depend upon, inter alia, the
reader’s skill, the reader’s experience of this type of text, the reader’s
familiarity with any terminology, and the reader’s purpose in reading.
Similarly, models of how readers construct meaning incorporate the cues
provided by their knowledge of the world, the writer, and the topic; they
also allow for the way a word’s range of possible senses are constrained
by the context within which it occurs.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS AND TESOL

From all that has been said so far, one would expect psycholinguistic
findings to be grist for the mill of those working within TESOL, but that
has not been the case. There are a number of reasons why. Most obvi-
ously, psycholinguistics demands familiarity with ideas in both language
and psychology. Linguists and psychologists have different priorities and
different ways of thinking. As George Miller put it (1990): “Grammarians
are more interested in what could be said than in what people actually
say, which irritates psychologists, and psychologists insist on supplement-
ing intuition with objective evidence, which irritates linguists” (p. 321).
In addition, psycholinguistics draws its information from a range of
other domains, including discourse analysis, phonetics, language pathol-
ogy, computer modelling, and neuroscience. This eclecticism makes the
field exciting to those of us who work in it, but bewildering, to say the
least, to somebody who comes to it afresh. So psycholinguistics is some-
times perceived as daunting to teach and study. It is certainly not, but it
is quite often given a lower profile in university courses (including mas-
ter of arts in TESOL programs) than it deserves, and it may end up being
taught by nonspecialists.1
Another complication is that psycholinguistic research has two very
different traditions. There is an evidence-driven approach, which examines
how human beings acquire, produce, and understand language with a

1
This is particularly the case in the United Kingdom, where many departments of applied
linguistics and schools of education are underinformed and understaffed in this area. The
situation appears to be rather better in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

362 TESOL QUARTERLY

view to tracing similarities of behavior between users. It relies heavily on
experimental findings and on observation. There is also a parallel theory-
driven approach, in which researchers adopt the assumption that the
accounts of language constructed by linguists correspond closely to what
actually takes place in the mind and use them as a framework for inves-
tigating the nature of language competence. If anything, the gap be-
tween the two has widened in recent years. The theory-driven approach
still adheres to the traditional notion of language as rule-governed be-
havior, whereas many who espouse the evidence-driven approach are
willing to contemplate the possibility that language use is driven by ex-
ample rather than rule.
The importance of psycholinguistic theory is increasingly being rec-
ognized by specialists in second language acquisition (SLA). A number
of distinguished researchers (among them, Segalowitz, Nick Ellis, DeKey-
ser, Hulstijn, Schmidt, Long, and Robinson) have drawn on concepts
such as automaticity, working memory, implicit learning, and attention,
in order to provide insights into how L2s are acquired. However, it also
has to be acknowledged that other writers more immediately concerned
with the applications to TESOL have sometimes used the terms psycho-
linguistic and cognitive very loosely and have explained background
theory inadequately. The message has to be: Caveat lector.
All of this makes the present issue of TESOL Quarterly especially timely.
Its aim is to build bridges to some of the more important ideas in psy-
cholinguistics and to show their relevance to English language teaching.
All the articles included in this issue fall within the evidence-driven
tradition. They draw upon well-established principles of cognitive psy-
chology and apply them to the special circumstances of the L2 learner
and user. There is a particular emphasis on L1 processing and how it can
assist our understanding of processing in an L2, but issues connected
with vocabulary, bilingualism, and acquisition are also represented.
The remainder of this introduction outlines some of the ideas that are
touched upon by contributors. The coverage is by no means compre-
hensive and is not intended to offer a state-of-the-art picture of psycho-
linguistics (for more detail on the various topics, see Field, 2004b). The
principal concerns of psycholinguistics are taken to be:

• How individuals acquire language (whether an L1 or an L2)

• How individuals store language in their minds
• How individuals use language (how they assemble it into produc-
tions and how they understand it when produced by others)
These three areas of enquiry provide a structure for the discussion that
follows.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS AND TESOL 363

ACQUIRING

It might seem that psycholinguistic studies of first language acquisi-

tion (FLA) would have a great deal to offer to our understanding of how
an L2 is acquired. However, the point has often been made that the
situation of ESL learners is very different from that of infants acquiring
English as L1. ESL learners possess an already-established L1 and are
often fully developed cognitively and capable of analysing input criti-
cally.

Acquiring Expertise

One answer has been to treat L2 proficiency not as the outcome of a

constrained process that follows the course of FLA, but as a form of
expertise that has to be developed over time. Widely quoted have been
Anderson’s ACT models (e.g., Anderson, 1983), which postulate that a
novice in any form of expertise (driving a car, playing chess, etc.) starts
out with a form of declarative knowledge (knowledge that) which becomes
transformed through practice into procedural knowledge (knowledge
how).
In the ACT models, practice brings two particular benefits, which
serve to reduce the demands on a language user’s working memory.
Anderson himself has associated them with SLA. Firstly, single steps
within a larger operation become combined. One way of representing
this in language learning is in terms of building discrete lexical items
into chunks (Wray, 2002). Secondly, and very importantly, the steps
become increasingly automatic until they make minimal demands on the
attention of the performer. A major difference between a novice and a
skilled L2 user lies in how automatic the processes are that the user
commands (DeKeyser, 2001; Segalowitz, 2003). The concepts of working
memory, automaticity, and attention are mentioned in several of the articles
in this volume (Farris, Trofimovich, Segalowitz, & Gatbonton; Field;
Spelman-Miller, Lindgren, & Sullivan; Walter).

Exemplar Models

The influence of FLA can be seen more directly when we consider the
type of knowledge that is acquired by an L2 learner. Recent instance-based
theories (or exemplar models) propose that we acquire our L1 by assem-
bling multiple traces of the encounters we have had with speakers. Thus,
a child builds up a composite representation of the category DOG by

364 TESOL QUARTERLY

drawing upon a set of images of most or all of the real-world animals that,
over time, have had this particular label attached to them by an adult
(Hintzman, 1986). Similarly, the child learns to place an –ing form after
enjoy, a to infinitive after want and a simple stem after can because mul-
tiple exposures to these patterns are recorded in the child’s mind. This
hypothesis might seem implausibly wasteful, but it accords with what has
been increasingly learned about the massive storage capacity of the hu-
man brain (Da˛browska, 2004, p. 18).
Exemplar theory has given rise to a view of SLA as
• potentially implicit and incidental, with the learner accumulating traces
without necessarily being able to express what has been acquired
(Schmidt, 1994; Hulstijn, 2003)
• emergentist, with patterns of L2 knowledge being built up randomly in
a way that is determined by exposure to the target language (Larsen-
Freeman, 1997; Ellis, 1998)
• example based, with the learner matching new examples of words or
syntactic structures to examples encountered earlier, rather than
relying principally on abstract grammar rules (Tomasello, 2003)
• sensitive to relative frequency, since the more examples a learner has
encountered of a particular word or pattern, the more firmly estab-
lished it will be in his or her mind (Bybee & Hopper, 2001)
This perspective strongly informs the article in this issue by Ellis, Simp-
son-Vlach, and Maynard.

STORING

How language is stored receives comparatively little attention within

TESOL. Teachers speak of learners acquiring a set of phoneme values or
a productive vocabulary but tend not to discuss precisely what is being
acquired.

Variability

Among the complicating factors is the variable nature of the spoken

input to which learners are exposed. Words are taught in their citation
forms, but in connected speech they are subject to strong reductive
influences when they are not the most prominent item in an intonation
group. Do L2 learners then have to store a range of possible realisations
of each word as part of their oral vocabulary?

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS AND TESOL 365

 Two possible answers have just been mentioned. We might assume
that, instead of a single citation form of the word being stored in the
mind, the language user draws upon multiple traces of it, said in differ-
ent voices on different occasions. Another solution is to assume that
many words are not only stored individually but are also embedded into
recurrent chunks of language (Pawley & Syder, 1983). Within the chunk,
their form remains more consistent; the information that is stored may
even include a standard prosodic pattern.
This is the background to an initiative by researchers at the University
of Michigan, who aim to establish a dataset of frequent formulaic chunks
that are of use to those studying English for academic purposes. One of
the problems in constructing such a resource lies in defining what is or
is not recognized as a formulaic chunk. Ellis, Simpson-Vlach, and Maynard
(this issue) investigate three factors which cause a language user to re-
gard a chunk as a linguistic unit. They are its length, the cumulative
frequency of the components of the chunk, and mutual information (MI),
the extent to which the components of the chunk co-occur across the
corpus in question. The writers report that the most important factor for
L1 users proved to be MI but that for L2 users tested, it was cumulative
frequency. This result suggests that, even at quite an advanced level, L2
users continue to process the formulaic chunk as if it were a set of
independent words.

The Bilingual Lexicon

A second issue concerns the structure of the vocabulary store that a

language learner draws upon. Assuming a bilingual has two relatively
complete systems of vocabulary, how are they distributed? Are they in
separate stores but linked to a single semantic base in which fundamen-
tal real-world concepts are held? Are they in separate stores, each with its
own semantic base? Or are they in one single store? A number of leading
researchers (e.g., Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 1998) have come to favour the
last option.
There are then interesting consequences for any view of how words
are recognised by a bilingual reader. The most widely accepted model of
word recognition holds that input in the form of a group of letters
triggers a process of competition, in which a reader foregrounds a set of
possible matches for a group of letters on the page. The candidates are
favoured (activated) to different degrees according to how frequent they
are and how closely they resemble the stimulus. As evidence accumu-

366 TESOL QUARTERLY

lates, one item achieves such a high level of activation that it wins out
over all the others and becomes recognised.2
If one subscribes to the single-store solution, then one has to accept
that candidates from both a bilingual’s languages will enter the compe-
tition. An English–Spanish bilingual might be operating in English, but
the sight of the word animal would trigger access to the identical word in
Spanish as well. It has indeed been demonstrated that words like animal
with shared meanings across two languages are recognised more quickly
by bilinguals than they are by monolinguals (Van Hell & Dijkstra, 2002).
The contribution by Sunderman and Schwartz (this issue) extends
earlier studies by asking what happens in the case of words such as grave,
which have (for the reader at least) one sense in Spanish but two in
English. As the researchers hypothesised, the existence of the additional
mismatched sense weakens the advantage that is gained from a shared
form.
The article by Ecke (this issue) also focuses on the bilingual lexicon.
It examines what occurs when a speaker cannot retrieve a word in his or
her L1. Faced with what is known in psycholinguistics as a tip-of-the-tongue
state (Brown & McNeill, 1966), speakers draw upon mental cues to the
target, including words which resemble it in form. Ecke finds evidence
that when a group of Spanish–English bilinguals are attempting to re-
trieve a word in Spanish, they make use of retrieval cues from both their
languages. The number of English cues used becomes larger as ESL
proficiency increases. This evidence thus lends further support to the
notion of a single lexical store.

USING

A third area of psycholinguistics, often referred to as language process-

ing,3 is concerned with how users of a language assemble utterances and
how they understand the productions of others. This is potentially the
richest vein of all for TESOL practitioners because it can shape under-
standing of what constitutes expertise in speaking, listening, reading,
and writing. A problem for the teaching of all four skills is that instruc-
tors often lack a clear and detailed idea of the behavior that they wish to
induce in their learners and thus a goal towards which their teaching
might tend. They fall back on conventional methods such as the com-
prehension approach in reading and listening or the grading of tasks

2
A similar principle has been applied to listening.
3
Throughout, the term is used for both production and reception. Some commentators
limit it to reception.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS AND TESOL 367

and genres in speaking and writing, but these generalized approaches
often fail to address the detail of what it is that constitutes a successful L2
speaker, listener, writer, or reader.
It is only relatively recently that language processing theory has begun
to influence skills instruction in TESOL. It is therefore noteworthy that
six of the nine studies accepted for this special issue focus on skills.

Speaking
A major concern in constructing models of L1 speaking has lain in an
apparent incompatibility between the syntactic complexity of certain ut-
terances and the speed with which they are assembled. How do speakers
manage, in much less than a second, to retrieve appropriate words from
a vocabulary of at least 30,000 items and to slot them into a syntactic
structure? Two possible answers have already been mentioned. First, the
speaker is assisted by storing recurrent strings of words in the form of
preassembled chunks, in which the syntax is ready-made (Wray, 2002).
Second, many of the processes that support L1 speech production are
highly automatic (Levelt, 1989, pp. 20–22). These two features of skilled
L1 speech minimise the cognitive demands that speech production im-
poses on a speaker.
However, with many L2 speakers, chunking and automatisation are
only partially acquired—with the result that assembling an utterance
requires considerably greater resources of attention. The problem is that
our resources of attention are strictly limited; if they are partly given over
to speaking, then there will be fewer available for other possible tasks.
And vice versa: If there are demanding tasks that have to be done, then
the speaker’s ability to assemble an accurate and comprehensible utter-
ance may be affected.
This is perhaps not an issue in everyday conversation, but it becomes
one in conditions where lives may be at stake. In a fascinating article,
Farris, Trofimovich, Segalowitz, and Gatbonton (this issue) investigate
the extent to which the L2 productions of air traffic controllers are
successful in conveying their intended message. They investigate the
communication skills of trainee controllers under conditions which in-
corporate the other simultaneous demands that are likely to be made on
their attention. The findings make compelling reading for airline trav-
ellers.

Listening
Psycholinguistics distinguishes two operations in listening. The first is
perceptual, with the listener decoding the signal that reaches the ear.

368 TESOL QUARTERLY

The second is conceptual, with the listener building meaning by contex-
tualising the words that have been decoded. In accounts of L2 listening,
writers sometimes imply that the two operations are alternatives rather
than mutually dependent (see Field, 2004a, for a discussion). A received
view has developed that decoding is the lesser partner because any prob-
lems in this area can usually be redressed by the use of what is loosely
termed context. This line of argument ignores the fact that a small error
of word recognition can have an impact on the understanding of the
whole utterance and indeed of the whole discourse. Recently, opinion
has shifted and there has been a renewed interest in how input contrib-
utes to the meaning that is extracted (Field, 2008).
If we are to learn more about the way in which an L2 listener combines
cues from input with cues from context, then it is imperative to know
how much of the input is likely to be successfully decoded and if there
are biases in the way the listener distributes his or her attention. Field
(this issue) cites evidence from psycholinguistics that content and func-
tion words are processed differently. In English, fast-track decoding for
function words is assisted by their association with weak quality syllables
(Grosjean & Gee, 1987). This characteristic raises the question of how L2
listeners handle function words. They might find them easy to identify
because of their high frequency or hard to identify because of their low
prominence. The answer provides an indication of the type of intake that
an L2 learner of English derives from an utterance: to what extent it
contains elements of syntax and to what extent it is lexically based.

Writing

TESOL practitioners are generally familiar with what is termed a pro-

cess approach to the teaching of L2 writing, in which learners are en-
couraged to draft, review, and revise their texts, often working in pairs or
groups (White & Arndt, 1991). They may not be aware that this approach
largely grew out of early psycholinguistic models of L1 writing which
identified the phases through which a writer proceeds. Most models
(e.g., Hayes & Flower, 1980; Kellogg, 1994) mention four main phases:
planning, translation (from ideas to language), execution, and editing.4
The important point about the phases is that they do not form a neat
sequence: They are recursive, with the writer free to go back at any
moment and change what was planned or what was written. Insights into
these writing decisions are obtained by two methods: (a) by asking writ-
ers to produce a verbal report of what is in their minds as they write, and

4
These terms are not universally employed.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS AND TESOL 369

(b) by maintaining a record of a writer’s keystrokes and thus of all the
revisions made. Spelman Miller, Lingren, and Sullivan (this issue) are
leading exponents of keystroke logging as a means of investigating L2
writing processes. In their article they provide a detailed rationale for the
method and give concrete examples of the informative data it provides.
Their particular interest here is to track longitudinally the developments
in L2 writing skills across 3 years of study.

Reading

A point shared by two of the three articles on reading in this issue, and
one that may appear surprising, is the part played by phonology. Firstly,
it is now generally accepted that readers of alphabetic scripts use two
routes for identifying words: a lexical (or whole word) one and a sublexical
one based on grapheme–phoneme relationships (Coltheart, 1978). This
dual approach is even employed by users of a relatively opaque spelling
system such as the English one. However, the ability to recognise discrete
phonemes (and thus to make the letter-sound connections that an al-
phabetic system requires) may not be innate. Widely quoted studies in L1
psycholinguistics (e.g., Morais, Cary, Alegria, & Bertelson, 1979) have
suggested that illiterate individuals are incapable of recognising and
manipulating phonemes (a typical task is to ask them what word remains
after deleting the first sound from gold). Commentators have concluded
that phonological awareness (the knowledge that speech in any language
draws upon a finite system of sound values)5 may be a byproduct of
learning to read using an alphabetical writing system (see Goswami &
Bryant, 1990 for a critical review of this theory).
If one accepts that this faculty is acquired in the way described, then
matching regular written forms to their spoken equivalents must be
more difficult for those whose L1 does not have an alphabetical system.
McDowell and Lorch (this issue) compare readers from mainland China
who were introduced to alphabetic principles in the form of pinyin (an
early reading script) with readers from Hong Kong who mastered logo-
graphic Chinese characters without pinyin and thus have had no expo-
sure to phoneme-level analysis in L1. McDowell and Lorch expand on
earlier studies by adding a third condition: They include a group of
learners with formal phoneme training in the form of exposure to the
International Phonetic Alphabet.
There is a second way in which phonology is implicated in reading.

5
Note that this is entirely distinct from the concept of phonological working memory, discussed
by Walter (this issue).

370 TESOL QUARTERLY

Readers briefly store recently decoded words in their minds while they
build them into a unit of meaning. Considerable evidence exists (Gath-
ercole & Baddeley, 1993, pp. 78–91) that readers store them in phono-
logical form.6 It may seem illogical to recode visual input in this way, but
it enables our minds to keep apart material that has just been read from
material that is currently being scanned by the eyes. This particular
function of phonology raises intriguing questions as far as L2 readers are
concerned. Given that language learners often have an imperfect mas-
tery of the phonological values of the target language, what form does
this “voice in the head” take?
Walter (this issue) investigates the relationship between L2 reading
skills and familiarity with the L2 phonological system. She draws upon a
well-established finding in memory research: Because of the way words
are encoded in the mind, subjects find it difficult to remember groups of
written words that are phonologically similar. Replicating this test with
French-speaking readers of English, Walter reports a significant differ-
ence between the performance of poor comprehenders and that of more
skilled ones. She concludes that, for L2 readers, the ability to internalise
words and to hold them in the mind in phonological form makes an
important contribution to successful meaning construction.
Where McDowell & Lorch and Walter apply L1 psycholinguistic prin-
ciples to an L2 context, Crossley, Greenfield, and McNamara (this issue)
draw attention to an area of reading studies that has tended to neglect a
cognitive perspective altogether. Their interest lies in readability: Specifi-
cally, they aim to achieve computer-generated measures of the relative
difficulty of a text for an L2 reader. They point out that the criteria
traditionally used in readability studies are text centered rather than
reader centered. They identify three measures that correspond loosely to
the three operations into which some psycholinguists divide reading,
namely, decoding, parsing, and meaning building. Running their Coh-
Metrix program using these three measures, they achieve outcomes
more accurately predictive than earlier ones of level of reading difficulty,
as indicated by the responses of Japanese students in an established
database.

CONCLUSION
The articles in this special issue illustrate the range and variety of the
insights into L2 performance that can be achieved by drawing on find-

6
Note that, though the stored information is in some kind of phonological form, it is not
like a voice articulating the words; if it were, we would not be able to read silently so much
faster than we can read aloud.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS AND TESOL 371

ings in psycholinguistics. The strength of the findings in question is that
they are not speculative or intuitive but are supported by strong empiri-
cal evidence of how language users actually behave.
The issue demonstrates how a better understanding of language pro-
cessing might influence the way in which the teaching of all four skills is
handled. It also adds to what we know of how vocabulary is stored in L2
users’ minds. I sincerely hope that it will raise a curtain on some insuf-
ficiently explored aspects of learner behavior. I hope, too, that it will
stimulate new interest in an exciting and rigorous field of enquiry that
has enormous relevance to TESOL practitioners.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I express my gratitude to Suresh Canagarajah for having approached me to do this

special issue—a bold and very welcome initiative given the limited profile that psy-
cholinguistics has received. I owe an enormous debt to all who assisted me with the
issue, particularly to those who gave so generously of their time and expertise in
commenting (perceptively and often in considerable detail) on the submissions.
Sincere thanks to everyone.

THE AUTHOR

John Field teaches psycholinguistics and child language development at the Univer-
sity of Reading, England, and cognitive approaches to second language acquisition at
Cambridge University, England. His interests lie in applying psycholinguistic theory
to issues in L2 learning, especially listening. He is committed to making psycholin-
guistics available to a wider audience through his writing and teaching.

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