In an overview of theories in psychology, linguistics and language pedagogy, Gaonac'h (1991) calls our attention to one of the principal themes treated by Gestalt-Psychology: the perception and resolution of problems. He cites the work of Koffka (1935), for whom the determiners of acquisition cannot be reduced to an informant's physical environment. A certain number of internal factors must be taken into consideration as well, such as the individual's attitudes, needs and abilities. Gaonac'h concludes that the learning problem becomes secondary with respect to the problem of perception. In other words, perception is a prerequisite for learning; one cannot learn something that has not been or cannot be perceived. Therefore, the difficulty of a learning problem is first and foremost a perception problem. Following this approach, we consider 'perception' as the fundamental language activity necessary for comprehension and grammatical analysis, to be discussed in subsequent chapters.

Sentence Repetition Test

Applying this notion of a 'perception problem' to the acquisition of a second language, we devote this chapter to an analysis of data collected to investigate the perceptual activity of our French learners of Polish. To expand upon the Zwitserlood et al. (2000) psycholinguistic study in which native Dutch speakers were exposed to 15 minutes of Chinese input, we used a sentence repetition test with two participant groups, namely, one group of 'first exposure' informants and our group of 8 monolingual French learners of Polish. In their study, Zwitserlood et al. found that learners were able to recognise certain regularities in Chinese even after only 15 minutes of exposure. Along the same lines, we were interested in discovering what elements of Polish could be perceived and repeated by our informants upon absolute first contact with the language and at specific intervals of exposure thereafter.

Slobin (1985: 1164) points out for child language acquisition that, 'On the most basic level, accessibility of linguistic material can be defined in terms of PERCEPTIBILITY.