Psycholinguistic Approach to Second Language Acquisition

The notion of mental representation has been a core assumption led to the revolution in cognitive sciences. Whether this representation is symbolic or connectionist was always a source of contention. Also, there has been controversy whether the mind should be viewed as modular or a bundle of modules. The paper claims in psycholinguistic approaches there is less concern with the interface between syntactic form and pragmatic function. The shift from competence-oriented theory to performance-oriented theory was an impetus that motivates the authors to have a theoretical study on the tenets of models suggested.