The Effect of Explicit Instruction on Implicit and Explicit Linguistic Knowledge in Kindergartners

ABSTRACT

Research consistently shows that adults engaged in tutored acquisition benefit from explicit instruction in several linguistic domains. For preschool children, it is often assumed that such explicit instruction does not make a difference. In the present study, we investigated whether explicit instruction affected young learners in acquiring a morpho-syntactic element. A total of 103 Dutch-speaking kindergartners (M = 5;7) received training in a miniature language to learn a meaningful agreement marker. Results from a picture matching task, during which eye movements were recorded, provided no evidence that explicit instruction led to higher accuracy rates, but suggest that it did lead to earlier predictive eye movements. These data seem incompatible with the idea that explicit instruction does not make a difference when kindergartners learn a grammatical element, and tentatively suggest that explicit instruction has a different effect on explicit knowledge than on implicit knowledge in this age group.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dirk-Jan Vet, Imme Lammertink, Channa van Dijk, Afra Klarenbeek & Klaas Seinhorst for their help with constructing the experiment, Joris Wolterbeek for his help carrying out the experiment, and the participating schools for their hospitality.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ All words and their translations can be found in Appendix A.

² See our scripts for other statistical output, such as unconverted estimates and standard errors.

³ Chan et al. (2018), for example, compare a cluster based permutation analysis, similar to our analysis, to a regression model in which more than one predictor can be taken into account, but they argue the latter analysis is a weaker one for this type of data. This may be because scores need to be aggregated to make the data suitable for a regression analysis.

⁴ Ideally, this analysis would only have included filler items for which participants gave correct answers. However, participants gave a correct answer for approximately half of the filler items. As a result, we ended up with a rather low number of items that we could use for this additional analysis. We did run this analysis, but did not report in the article because of low statistical power. It can be found in the supplementary materials. The outcomes show a similar picture as presented in the analysis that used all (correctly and incorrectly answered) fillers.

Additional information

Funding

This project is funded by the University of Amsterdam.