ABSTRACT
The associative-cognitive CREED provides an additional perspective on this issue by including roles for blocking and learned attention which bias new learning. Together, the linguistic knowledge and the processing/attentional knowledge that speakers bring to the learning of a new language are connected and each exerts different influences on L2 learning. In other words, one way to incorporate experience into theories of L2 learning and approaches to L2 instruction is to focus on how speakers use language to communicate rather than prioritizing the construction of linguistic knowledge only. Indeed, a lack of terminological and conceptual clarity is potentially one reason for the perceived lack of progress in advancing a theory of transfer. Bybee discusses the cognitive processes as being critical to understanding language development and use. For example, categorization in language learning involves “similarity and identity matching that occurs when words and phrases and their component parts are recognized and matched to stored representations”.
