Influence of Social Class on Cognitive Development of Syntax: A Study of Pakistani EFL Learners

Abstract

Language has long been considered a cognitive phenomenon by theorists who believed that it is in cognition that language develops as a communication tool. However, cognitive linguistics recently realized that language is not merely an innate, natural or cognitive phenomenon, but develops in socially and culturally situated cognition. Cognitive sociolinguistics emerged as a sub-discipline of cognitive linguistics which believed that selection of linguistic variants by its users is governed not only by cognitive but also social constraints. Social constructionism as an approach became relevant to this conception of language as it guided the researchers to believe that cognition and language are socially constructed phenomena. Social cognition theories explained the link between cognition and society, and made it easy to understand language as a social cognitive phenomenon rather than a purely cognitive one. Variationist studies focused on the link between linguistic and social variables, and researchers started to study the link between linguistic variants and social classes of the speakers. In the same vein, this research project aims to explore correlation between social class and the cognitive development of syntax among the learners of English language in Pakistani universities. It aims to highlight how social approaches to language differ from cognitive approaches in their understanding of language acquisition and how the former emphasizes the social nature of language development. The study follows correlational method of research to find out the relationship between social class of the adult learners of English and cognitive development of syntax among them. Apart from social class, which is the main social variable studied in this research for its correlation with cognitive development of language, the research also takes into account gender, marital status and age as extraneous variables and studies the relationship of these with the sample’s performance in a syntax-based test. The population for this study consisted of male and female students of English language courses belonging to three universities of Pakistani capital Islamabad. To collect social class data and test syntactic skills of the sample, two research tools were designed; a Socio-economic Index (SES Index or SEI) and a Syntax-based test. The SES Index consisted of five social class variables. These are occupation, income, educational qualification, medium of instruction, and property. The sample was asked to provide details of the said variables about three family members; the subjects themselves, their fathers and mothers. The second tool designed for this research was Syntax test which aimed to test various syntactic skills of the sample. Their performance in the syntax based test was considered an indicator of their cognitive development. The participants were required to fill up the SES Index and solve the test. Both the tools had equal marks, that is, 100. This class score of the respondents was studied for its correlation with the syntax score. SPSS was used to study correlation between social class score / SES score of the individuals and their syntax score. The results yielded moderately significant positive correlation between social class of the individuals and their syntax score and the hypothesis that there is a positive correlation between the two variables was retained. Further, the population was divided into three social classes on the basis on 33% percentile and regression was run to see mean score difference, which pointed out significant mean difference in three SC groups. T-test and Mann Whitney were run in SPSS to study the relationship between gender, marital status and age and syntax. The data were categorized according to these variables and then the tests were applied. In case of gender, which is the first extraneous variable, the mean difference between males and females was significant with females scoring more in syntax test than males, but SPSS showed that these results were statistically non-significant, so the hypothesis of unequal variance between males and females was rejected. The t-test regarding married and single population proved statistically significant difference with married scoring higher than the singles in syntax test. Unlike gender and marital status variables, age variable had three groups, and due to non-homogenous population in these three groups, non-parametric Mann-Whitney test was run. No statistically significant difference was found in the mean rank of age group 1 and 2, and 1 & 3. Also, no statistically significant difference was found in the mean rank of the two age groups, which proved equal performance in syntax test by both groups.