ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on chaos in monolingual and bilingual speech and provides additional allusions to the complexity involved in language learning. It reviews the aspects of chaos theory, as these apply to understanding of language and language learning. Mirroring the trend across scientific disciplines, recent approaches to language processing and learning have recognized the need for a holistic, multiplanar viewpoint and turned to chaos theory for answers. In many of these publications, the theory of chaos is known as chaos/complexity theory or dynamic systems theory, and their complementarity is acknowledged. Chaos theory is often used in the study of language in a metaphorical sense. However, chaos theory is an essentially mathematical field. Studying development in terms of chaos encourages viewing growth as a “quantifiable variable. Dense and longitudinal speech data facilitate detailed investigations in terms of chaos theory in language. Language learning is instigated by the self-organization of the system as stated, and also by adaptation to the environment.