some thoughts on second language acquistion

L1 Tansfer, Phonological Working Memory in Predicting L2A, and Lingusitic Knowledge in General"

I have been reading some language acquistion articles about the concept of "working memory". The definition of this term by different people is a chaos, which I don't intend to tackle. But they all point to similar directions:

First, one's native language ability, whether literacy, or some kinda linguistic knowledge (e.g. vacabulary, the "legal" combination of phonemes in a word", reading or listening comeprehension) will affect his/her learning a foreign language.

Specifically, if this ability is tested under a short-term memory based test, (like a reading span test, listening span test, or word digit test in which the subjects were asked to recall words, answer comprehension questions, etc.) the test result usually correlates with one's performance on foreign language learning. It might look obvious to link these working memory tasks to linguistic performance because the these working memory tasks are designed to tesk some parts of one's language ability, and is done through the medium of language. Therefore, if one has high literacy/reading comprehension in L1, they tend to have better performance on L2 than those with low performance on literacy/reading comprehension/working memory tests.


Second, the short-term memory performance can be disrrupted, or inhanced with different techniques. For example, making the subject tap the table while listening or reading to learn a new foreign vocabulary can intervene subjects' learning. On the contrary, if the subjects read outloud the foreign words, they can remember more than just reading the words silently. To strech further from the working memory tasks themselves, some study found "noticing" has some correlation with high/low working memory capacity.

If I were to put a conclusion from what I have read, it seemed that linguistic knowledge, whether first or second language, has such an interrelated relationship. This is obvious through our world experiences, because we can easily find your L1 transfer, whether negative or positive, is affecting one's foreign language learning. We all draw references from something we already knew. But this interconnected linguistic knowledge still puzzles me. What would be the representaion of linguistic knowledge in the brain? Will it be just like other representations of the world?
Think of a word that you learned in a foreign language. You might be able to remember the episodic event relating to the context you learn the word. Or even your feelings, emotions, etc. Perhaps language is just like other constructive blocks that build up our cognition, our world, is like an association network, with different nodes (meaning, usage, episodic memory, emotions, etc.).