Showing papers by "John N. Williams published in 2012"

Implicit and Explicit Knowledge in Second Language Acquisition.

Abstract: Language development is frequently characterized as a process where learning proceeds implicitly, that is, incidentally and in absence of awareness of what was learned. This article reports the results of two experiments that investigated whether second language acquisition can also result in implicit knowledge. Adult learners were trained on an artificial language under incidental learning conditions and then tested by means of grammaticality judgments and subjective measures of awareness. The results indicate that incidental exposure to second language syntax can result in unconscious knowledge, which suggests that at least some of the learning in this experiment was implicit. At the same time, however, it was also found that conscious (but unverbalizable) knowledge was clearly linked to improved performance in the grammaticality judgment task.

Implicit learning in second language acquisition

Abstract: The process of implicit learning, essentially the ability to acquire unconscious knowledge, is an elementary and ubiquitous process of human cognition. Keywords: cognitive science; psycholinguistics; second language acquisition

Constraints on Implicit Learning of Grammatical Form-Meaning Connections

Abstract: Although there is good evidence for implicit learning of associations between forms, little work has investigated implicit learning of form-meaning connections, and the findings are somewhat contradictory. Two experiments were carried out using a novel reaction time methodology to investigate implicit learning of grammatical form-meaning connections. Participants learned four novel articles but were not told about a critical semantic factor that determines agreement with the accompanying noun. Their task was to indicate as quickly as possible which of two pictures was being referred to by an article-noun combination. The measure of learning was whether response times would slow down when the agreement rule was violated (i.e., when the wrong article was used for the picture being referred to). Experiment 1 revealed such an effect when articles correlated with noun animacy, even for participants with no reported awareness of this regularity. In Experiment 2 no such effect was obtained when the regularity concerned the relative size of two objects. It is concluded that grammatical form-meaning connections may be learned implicitly, but learning is constrained by the nature of the meaning involved. It is argued that concepts are differentially available to implicit language learning processes.

Constraints on Implicit Learning of Grammatical Form-Meaning Connections

Abstract: Although there is good evidence for implicit learning of associations between forms, little work has investigated implicit learning of form-meaning connections, and the findings are somewhat contradictory. Two experiments were carried out using a novel reaction time methodology to investigate implicit learning of grammatical form-meaning connections. Participants learned four novel articles but were not told about a critical semantic factor that determines agreement with the accompanying noun. Their task was to indicate as quickly as possible which of two pictures was being referred to by an article- noun combination. The measure of learning was whether response times would slow down when the agreement rule was violated (i.e., when the wrong article was used for the picture being referred to). Experiment 1 revealed such an effect when articles correlated with noun animacy, even for participants with no reported awareness of this regularity. In Experiment 2 no such effect was obtained when the regularity concerned the relative size of two objects. It is concluded that grammatical form-meaning connections may be learned implicitly, but learning is constrained by the nature of the meaning involved. It is argued that concepts are differentially available to implicit language learning processes.