Volume 43, Issue 1

This paper describes a framework for researching the Cognition Hypothesis which claims that pedagogic tasks be sequenced for learners on the basis of increases in their cognitive complexity. It distinguishes dimensions of complexity which increase the conceptual and linguistic demands tasks make on communication, so creating the conditions for L2 development, from dimensions which increase demands made on accessing a current interlanguage repertoire during real-time performance. Studies providing some support for three predictions of the Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson 2001a) are then reviewed. Increasing the cognitive demands of tasks along developmental dimensions; a) encourages grammaticization, and so greater accuracy and complexity of L2 production; b) promotes interaction and heightened attention to form, and memory for input, therefore increasing incorporation of forms made salient in the input; and c) individual differences contributing to perceptions of task difficulty progressively differentiate performance and learning as tasks increase in complexity.

A refinement of the verbal process category of MAK Halliday's System of Transitivity makes it possible to distinguish three sub-categories of verbal process: positive, negative and neutral. This in turn makes possible an analysis of negative verbal processes used in a corpus of 50 news texts from the UK Times which reveals some of the linguistic strategies used by journalists to encode their own (or their newspaper's own) world view in what they write and hence—intentionally or otherwise—to subtly push their readers' perception of the meaning of a text in a particular direction. The analysis also sheds light on the ways in which the dramatic content of a narrative can be enriched by the choice of certain verbal processes rather than others.

Three experiments examine the acquisition of word-initial consonant clusters by adult second language learners. Native speakers of Spanish acquiring English participated in a metalinguistic judgment task, a perception task, and a production task. The judgment task indicates that beginning, intermediate and advanced second language learners have an accurate knowledge of English word-initial consonant clusters, with no evidence of transfer from Spanish. However, learners are not able to use that information as effectively as native speakers in perception and production. Transfer does not appear to play a role in learners' perception, though it does in their production. The evidence also provides support for the role of universal developmental factors in second language perception.