Psycho-typology and its implications in the foreign language learning

Abstract

Seeking to go beyond generalizations involving the difficulty or easiness in learning foreign languages, in this paper we discuss issues referring to how real distances between languages are measured, and how to determine if the learning process of one language is more difficult than that of another. All of us, language scholars or not, have already taken our chances in discussing those questions, based many times on our own intuitions and personal experience. In order to clarify the questions mentioned above, the studies on language typology and psychotypology offer different contributions, relying, respectively, on objective and subjective aspects. Presented by Kellerman in the 1970s, the notion of psychotypology is still up-to-date in what concerns the studies about language transfer, and receives renovated attention in emerging research about the learning of more than one foreign language by the same person.