Animacy, frequency and working memory effects in the acquisition of a noun-adjective agreement pattern in L2 under incidental learning conditions

Animacy is recognized as an important feature in cognition and language processing. The present paper reports the results of an experiment that investigated the effects of animacy of the head noun (animate, denoting animals-epicenes, and inanimate, denoting non-living objects) and working memory on the learning of a noun-adjective agreement pattern in Russian. Participants were 60 novice learners whose L1 did not mark grammatical gender. The between-subjects design manipulated token frequency (high vs. low) under incidental learning conditions. No animacy effect was found in either learning condition. Working memory was a significant factor in both incidental learning conditions, and it explained a greater amount of variance in the high token frequency condition where accuracy was also significantly higher than in the low token condition. The results have implications for incidental learning research and language learning practices, specifically how different factors contribute to the acquisition of L2 grammatical knowledge

Incidental Learning of Gender Agreement in L2

Incidental learning of grammar has been an area of interest for many decades; nevertheless, existing research has primarily focused on artificial or semi-artificial languages. The present study examines the incidental acquisition of the grammar of a natural language by exposing adult speakers of an ungendered L1 (English) to the gender agreement patterns in Russian (a language that was novel to the learners). Both receptive and productive knowledge and the mediating role of working memory (WM) in learning were measured. Speakers of the ungendered language were able to successfully acquire receptive but not productive grammatical knowledge in a new language under incidental exposure. WM was engaged in production but not in a grammaticality judgment task in the incidental learning condition, indicating cognitive effort during knowledge retrieval

Frequency and working memory effects in incidental learning of a complex agreement pattern

Complex grammatical structures have been assumed to be best learned implicitly (Krashen, 1982, 1994; Reber, 1989). However, research to date has failed to support this view, instead finding that explicit training has overarching beneficial effects. The present study attempted to elucidate this issue by examining how type and token frequencies in incidental learning input and individual differences in the learner’s working memory (WM) combine to affect the receptive and productive learning of a complex agreement pattern in a novel language. The findings indicated that type frequency significantly enhanced receptive knowledge acquisition even more than explicit instruction. Performance on the productive knowledge retrieval task was poor under all learning conditions but most accurate under the explicit learning condition. WM was not implicated in incidental learning, possibly indicating that all learners experience high cognitive demand imposed by the target structure regardless of variation in WM capacity