Stephen van Vlack
Sookmyung Women`s University
Graduate School of TESOL
Human Learning and Cognition
Spring 2006
Week 6 Questions - Terry, Chapter 5 & Lamb, Chapters 8 and 9
1. How do the contingencies of non-reward, punishment, and avoidance work in instrumental conditioning? (T5)
Last week we dealt with instrumental learning which is basically all about trial and error learning in making associations between three different elements; the stimulus, response, and consequence. This week will really looking at us how we can use this information to condition people to behave in the way that we want. This means that we can use this knowledge to reinforce behavior that we like, such as studying and paying attention in class, but we can also use this information to try to alter behavior that we do not like, such as running around in class and not paying attention. In addition, there are also certain linguistic elements or language learning elements which we can also further define based on the type of information contained in theories of instrumental learning. This week in particular we are going to focus on trying to alter unwanted behaviors and reinforce better behaviors after having reprogrammed the unwanted behavior. This is done in response to what we did last week which is basically about reinforcing good or wanted behavior.
The three main contingencies available to us in the theory of instrumental conditioning in order to try to change behavior are non reward, punishment, and avoidance. Starting with the idea of non reward we see that it is actually a very simple idea. All this really entails is simply taking the reward away for a particular type of behavior. The expected effect would be that the behavior would stop. For example, I give you stickers on your homework assignments basically as a type of reward for doing the work. This is a reward because even if you don't do a great job you still get some sort of sticker. If I were to stop giving you stickers your performance on the homework would probably change. You might be less motivated and your drive to get a sticker would diminish because, hey!, there was no sticker. This seems very simple and straightforward but in the real world it might not actually be so easy. To start with we would need to know what the specific rewards are as a result of a particular behavior and try to remove them. If the reward is coming from somewhere that's out of our control like some sort of internal reward then there is actually very little we can do. Research on lab animals has also shown that even when the reward is removed they still seem to perform the action because they are used to it. It's a type of habituation where you get used to performing certain actions regardless of whether the reward is there or not.
Punishment is about trying to stop a certain behavior by changing the consequence from a positive one to a decidedly negative one. For example if a who child acts up in class is somehow rewarded for this by getting attention from other students, by getting universal laughter and an accompanying feeling of power then the teacher needs to find a punishment which is stronger than the positive consequences. It has been claimed, most notably by Skinner and Thorndike, that punishment doesn't work, at least not long-term but there have been many studies which show that punishment does work provided it is given immediately, consistently, and with a strong force (brutally, so as to eclipse any possible reward). What I mean by brutally is that it has to be a very strong punishment immediately and always. If the punishment starts off small and get stronger then the person will simply habituate to the punishment and it won't have the same effect. Although punishment does seem to work there is also a moral dilemma in punishment. For punishment to work it must be brutal and strong. This often has the effect of causing aggression among the punished group or person. Also punishment can also be sending mixed signals in that people still might be getting rewards as their punishment and some possible positive rewards become associated together. This was Skinner's main argument. It is, therefore, still important that the punishment really does strongly outweigh any kind of possible reward. Since we are not always available to punish students in every instance of behavior and, therefore, cannot control all the rewards this become somewhat of a tricky venture.
In avoidance, the third type of contingency, the behavior itself changes in order to avoid any kind of consequence. In order for this to happen it would seem to reason of course that the consequence would have to be negative. So, if we don't want something bad to happen we do something in advance which will stop that negative consequence. This mean to the behavior itself which would cause the consequence doesn't exist and is replaced by another type of behavior. As we said in class, the typical type of avoidance behavior that we find in the English language classroom in Korea would simply be silence. Students are silent because they are avoiding the punishment internal and external that comes from making mistakes. This punishment could and probably did originally come from the outside but it also comes from the inside with people that are highly sensitized to it. This type of silence in behavior probably is also a very strong result of a feeling of helplessness as we will discuss in the next question.
2. What is learned helplessness and how does it work? (T5)
Learned helplessness is simply the idea that a person learns that their actions or behaviors have no real effect on consequences. This means that no matter what they do, no matter how they behave certain things are going to happen regardless. The occurrence of certain things are outside their control. But this results and then becomes more than just avoidance, because avoidance often involves some kind of behavior, behavior that will stop a negative consequence happening. This type of avoidance still involves some sort of belief that actions will change things. In learned helplessness people stop doing anything basically because they feel that it doesn't matter whether they do something or not. This is often what happens in examples of severe depression. People do not want to do something because they don't see any reason for doing something. This ties in with the idea of movement and cognition that we read about in Ratey (2001).
In relation to the classroom setting, one of the sad things that we can mention in relation to learn helplessness is the children and students are often are prey to this. This results often stem from the type of assessment that children get in class as well as the type of feedback they receive. We, therefore, really need to be very careful about letting our children/ students feel at least somewhat empowered in the classroom. This is the whole idea behind learner centeredness and learner autonomy. Not only does learner autonomy allow the learners to actually learn a little bit better because they are learning what they want, but it also lets them feel that their actions actually mean something in the classroom. This might not be the case in a more teacher center class with students simply have to do what the teacher says.
3. What are some of the main applications of these ideas for us as language teachers? (T5)
Aside from the very straightforward classroom management applications of which there are many, there are also some applications of the idea of instrumental conditioning to language learning itself. Skinner, for one, was the chief proponent of the idea that instrument of conditioning was a very important basis for language learning. The basic idea is that conditioning allows people to fine-tune the type of language data they have in relation to functions and behavior. Different behavior and different results, provided they occurred in frequent enough succession with small interceding intervals, would be able to be learned and internalized.
Since this is the last of our chapters on behaviorism, let's just try to recap how behaviorists would see the language learning process by focusing on the four different chapters we discussed. In the first chapter we learned about habituation and basically the idea that people learn to tune out what is not important over a period of time. For us this is a very important first step as language learners. This basically relates to how we learn to focus attention. The ability to decide what's important and what's not worth focussing attention on is a very important skill that the brain needs to learn. Habituation is basically about focussing attention because it is not only the simple physical manifestation of the realization that certain things are not important, but with that the realization that certain other things ARE important. Once people have gotten some elemental habituation processes down they will then soon realize that pieces of language addressed to them are important as opposed to other things like the wind blowing. Through the simple idea of habituation people begin to realize that language is important (is always important), and through this idea they will begin to focus attention on language. Habituation is the key to recognizing that language is important (it has repercussions) whether it is focussed at them, either directly or indirectly. This of course has strong repercussions for us as language teachers. It means that we need to give our students direct types (focussed types) of input. Rather than have them just read about other people who they really don't care about, we really have to get them into language which is directed at them and which they need to respond to.
The next step that we focussed on is what's called simple classical conditioning. What happens in classical conditioning is that two things which really do not necessarily co-occur in the natural world (have an arbitrary relationship) are basically associated. That is, they do not normally enjoy a cause-effect type of relationship in the real world. They simply happen to co- occur sometimes in the real world for whatever reason. What happens here is at these things which co-occur become associated. This of course has been demonstrated in laboratories, but we can extend this to the real world by saying that pieces of language which happen to co-occur are associated in the brain. This seems to directly support a lexically-centered view like we get in Lamb (1999) with says that the basis of language are chunks of language and not individual words themselves. It also supports a generative type of language system by simply redefining the level in which the occurrences are meaningful. For linguists they might say that sound co-occurrences create patterns for words and possibly morpheme co-occurrences as word construction systems within a grammatical system. By simply looking at classical conditioning we can form an explanation for the basis of our lexical system. Both of these first two types of behaviorists learning that we have talked about really are context dependent. A person doesn't really actually have very much to do except to absorb what's in the environment. The actual learner doesn't have very much control.
It is in the next two, operant learning and operant conditioning, in which the person/learner begins exercise some control. In operant learning we now have a three-way association between two things plus the consequence of the previous associations. This takes the possibilities for language learning much, much higher. We now no longer simply have bits and pieces but we actually have results of those bits and pieces, that is functions. We originally said at an earlier date that part of classical conditioning might actually been making associations between certain forms and functions. Here with the advent of opera learning we can fine-tune these basic ideas which lends credence to the belief, or the observation really, that there is a multilevel series of connections between forms and functions. Children might start off with a one-to-one relationship between a form to function but with a little (trial and error) practice and actual exposure this will undoubtedly change. It is also clear that people test these types of connections and associations. They try to find out more about certain consequences, whether they are positive or negative. They are trying to determine what the result of testing these connections might be. This is where the operant conditioning idea comes in. It is operant conditioning, and of course in the real world this would happen as a result of exchanges with people not necessarily the weird kinds of things that they do in laboratories, which allow people to perform complex types of behavior such as avoidance.
4. Lamb identifies three main systems necessary for language what are they and how are they connected? (L8)
Lamb (1999) proposes three main systems as being necessary for language. Once more he arranges them hierarchically from top to bottom, or from more general to more specific functions, or as is often common language from larger and more general types of units to smaller and more specific types of units. The larger and more general of the systems is the meaning/function system. The system is somewhat extralinguistic in that it connects directly to concepts outside of language, but plays a very important role in driving linguistic production and concluding linguistic reception (in a somewhat simplistic view). The next system, the system in the middle, is the Lexico- – grammatical system. This is the system which handles everything from morphemes up to multi-word units and is a system which is purely linguistic in that it deals exclusively with linguistic units. These are units which have some sort of connection either to meaning itself or to other linguistic types of concepts, such as PAST. The next system in Lamb`s model is the phonological system. The phonological system deals with things below the morpheme level, and more specifically sounds and the muscles required for the articulatory gestures used to create specific sounds.
This might seem like an overly simplified system, especially when we compare it to a standard models of linguistics which include a lot more than three different systems, but once we combined morphology and syntax, phonetics and phonology, and semantics and pragmatics, then the model begins to make a little sense. The important leap that maybe some of us, more versed in and used to standard linguistic models, need to make is that lexis, morphology and syntax are linked. This connection reflects certain problems which linguists have had actually trying to separate morphology and syntax in addition to problems in dealing with lexis. Standard linguistic theory still relegate lexis to a simple memory role and does not give it any actual position in the linguistic system. It should be clear that Lamb`s model, and this is true of all cognitive linguistic models, not only doesn`t ignore lexis but actually puts lexis at the very center of the linguistic system.
5. What is Lamb`s position on bidirectional processing/ Do you agree or disagree? (L8)
The question of bidirectional process underscores the distinction between production and reception. In this model for many of the different neural networks proposed Lamb has posited the necessity of two different systems operating, one for production and the other for reception. This might seem necessary for such things as phonology where we actually pronounce (produce) words in our own specific way, which does vary but only slightly when compared to the different pronunciations which we hear (receive) on a regular basis. The basic idea is that we need to have an entire linguistic system which allows us to produce things in a somewhat fixed way, yet receive remarkably varied signals at the same time. Lamb`s simple way of dealing with this is to posit to different networks, one for reception and the other for production. In this way we can explain very easily variability in language. When it comes to lexis (lexical connections) however, Lamb posits only one system which will work both for production and reception. He posits this single system because lexis is directly linked to concepts in a way which other aspects of language are not. We can think of lexis as may be the buffer between concepts and language itself and as such has a somewhat different relationship to the variability we mentioned above in relation to simple phonology.
If there is only one lexical system then this system is going to have to be a bidirectional system. This means that lexis is going to need to move bottom up for reception and top-down for production. Luckily for us, there’s a very simple and powerful explanation for how this can actually work. The simple idea is what is called a feedback loop in this involves the simple positing that some of the connections from a neuron will go up while others will go down. The feedback loop is really important because it will connect the present state or a higher connections to lower ones throughout the process so that we can not only make sure that the process is going well, but that we have more connections between production and reception. It should be obvious the production and reception are not entirely separate. Again, using the area of phonology due to its simplicity, we can argue that certainly people appropriate language that is around them and this includes pronunciation. In fact it has been shown that across different languages phonological acquisition of a second language actually changes the phonological system of the first language (See Cook, 2003). As we move through life are linguistic system changes at all levels in these changes often occur as a result of reception indicating that there must be some sort of connection between production and reception if they are indeed separate.
This is pretty much what I want you get out of this discussion. Again, we are not overly interested in some of the specific formula in Lamb`s model. Rather, we are much more interested in some of the larger questions and ones which we can really turn to the brain for in order to try to answer.
6. What is the relationship between lexemes and concepts? (L9)
As we are finding out by looking at the brain and language specifically there is no one-to-one relationship between anything. Things are not fixed and are not simple and are composed of many different parts which are fused together through connections in the brain. Therefore, in looking at a lexical item it should be clear that this item is composed not only of a simple link to one concept but through thousands of links to thousands of different interconnecting concepts. At the same time a single concept will also link to many different lexical items. It should be remembered that we have posited lexis as the very center of this model. This means that lexis will have the most types of connections running through it, around it, above it, and below it. This means that it is also the most variable and this is one of the main points of which Lamb (1999) is trying to make here.
There is no one-to-one relationship between lexemes and concepts. Everything within his relationship is cognitively mediated. Like everything else in the brain this is broken down into bits and also in a constant state of flux. Our lexeme CAT is not directly linked to a perfect image of a cat which we’ve actually encountered in the real world. One of the things that this lexeme will be linked to is the concept of CAT which is above all a prototype. The prototype will be a conglomeration of lots of different features of all the different cats that we have seen in the world thus creating a totally unique and wholly nonexistent cat. Our concepts are ever-changing as a result of our different exposure and the more we live our lives the more different our internal world becomes from the external world. There are no simple one-to one representations.
7. What is the difference between inner and outer semantics? (L9)
Inner is bottom-up while outer is top-down
8. In a very general sense, how is meaning achieved by such a model and what needs to be involved? (L9)
In a very general sense meaning is achieved through the connection of networks which are organized in part hierarchically. As we mentioned above, there is no single link between a lexical item and its meaning. Meaning is achieved through networks of various kinds. Lamb mentioned some things which may be familiar to us such as procedure (schema) as well as semotactics which is basically the idea that we actually store things in what the semanticist Lehrer has termed semantic fields. In addition there is always the realization that categorization is an overriding process and how meaning is achieved. To these three we also have been all the different lexical associations which permeate the brain and were discussed briefly above in question number six in relation to the word cat.