Decreolization occurs when speakers of a creole (a pidgen that has become a native
language of a group) "gain varying degrees of contact with the group that speaks the base
language of the creole" (Schumann, p. 41). It is the process of moving toward the "standard
form" of the language. Creolists refer to several stages of decreolization, ranging
from the creole itself, to the basolect, which is close to the creole, the mesolect, the acrolect,
and finally, the standard form.
Psychological distance is determined by factors such as motivation, language and culture
shock, and other affective variables. Social distance results from social factors, such
as the relative dominance of the social group of the acquirer and speakers of the target
language, the cohesiveness of the groups, similarity in culture, etc. In Schumann's view
factors causing psychological and social distance "put the learner in a situation where he
is largely cut off from target language input and/or does not attend to it when it is available"
(Schumann, 1977, pp. 266-267).
Also of interest is the fact that Alberto's grammatical morpheme difficulty order (one
cross-section) correlates significantly with the "natural order" proposed earlier
(r = 0.73, p < 0.05; analysis in Krashen, 1977). The data was collected from his spontaneous
speech.
This is not the only interpretation of this result, as Earl Stevick has pointed out to me.
Something else may have caused Paz' superior second language acquisition, and the low
psychological distance score may be a result of this and not a cause.
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