Awareness and learning under incidental learning conditions

ABSTRACT

Recent years have witnessed a strong and increasing interest in the incidental learning of second language grammar. While much of this research has focused on the acquisition of second language word order or noun-determiner systems, relatively fewer studies have examined the learning of second language morphology. Results of studies that have examined the incidental learning of case-marking systems in particular have indicated that participants developed some, but not very much, knowledge of the target case-markers and, further, that the resulting knowledge from this exposure was partly implicit and partly explicit in nature. The present experiment set out to build upon the previous research in this area with the aim of taking a finer-grained look at the subjective measures used to assess implicit and explicit knowledge.

In the present experiment, participants were trained on a semi-artificial language system under incidental learning conditions. Learning was measured via a grammaticality judgement test and awareness was assessed via subjective measures of awareness and retrospective verbal reports. The results corroborated the finding of low levels of learning reported in previous research. However, in contrast to the previous findings, the finer-grained analyses of subjective measures of awareness indicated that this knowledge was fully explicit in nature. These results point towards limitations of criteria for identifying implicit knowledge as part of subjective measures of awareness.

KEYWORDS:

• SLA
• awareness
• implicit knowledge
• explicit knowledge
• morphology
• grammar learning

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Andrea Révész and Patrick Rebuschat for their guidance throughout this research project, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of the manuscript. This research project was partially funded by a Language Learning Dissertation Grant.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. However, the exact nature of the knowledge that is acquired as a result of exposure to input in artificial grammar learning studies has been a matter of fierce debate. See Perruchet (2008) for discussion.

2. Analyses of subjective measures for nominative and instrumental items are not included here, as performance on these items was not statistically significant against chance (50%).

3. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for highlighting these differences.

Additional information

Funding

Language Learning Dissertation Grant.

Notes on contributors

John Rogers

John Rogers is currently a lecturer and an English language program coordinator at Qatar University. His research to date has focused on the development and measurement of implicit and explicit knowledge as well as issues related to task-based teaching and learning.