Variability in second language learning:the roles of individual differences, learning conditions, and linguistic complexity

Second language learning outcomes are highly variable, due to a variety of factors, including individual differences, exposure conditions, and linguistic complexity. However, exactly how these factors interact to influence language learning is unknown. This paper examines the relationship between these three variables in language learners. Native English speakers were exposed to an artificial language containing three sentence patterns of varying linguistic complexity. They were randomly assigned to two groups – incidental and instructed – designed to promote the acquisition of implicit and explicit knowledge, respectively. Learning was assessed with a grammaticality judgment task, while subjective measures of awareness were used to measure whether exposure had resulted in implicit or explicit knowledge. Participants also completed cognitive tests. Awareness measures demonstrated that learners in the incidental group relied more on implicit knowledge, whereas learners in the instructed group relied more on explicit knowledge. Overall, exposure condition was the most significant predictor of performance on the grammaticality judgment task, with learners in the instructed group outperforming those in the incidental group. Performance on a procedural learning task accounted for additional variance. When outcomes were analysed according to linguistic complexity, exposure condition was the most significant predictor for two syntactic patterns, but it was not a predictor for the most complex sentence group; instead, procedural learning ability was

Cross cultural differences in implicit learning of chunks versus symmetries

Three experiments explore whether knowledge of grammars defining global vs. local regularities has an advantage in implicit acquisition and whether this advantage is affected by cultural differences. Participants were asked to listen to and memorize a number of strings of 10 syllables instantiating an inversion (i.e. a global pattern); after the training phase, they were required to judge whether new strings were well formed. In Experiment 1, Western people implicitly acquired the inversion rule defined over the Chinese tones in a similar way as Chinese participants when alternative structures (specifically, chunking and repetition structures) were controlled. In Experiment 2 and 3, we directly pitted knowledge of the inversion (global) against chunk (local) knowledge, and found that Chinese participants had a striking global advantage in implicit learning, which was greater than that of Western participants. Taken together, we show for the first time cross cultural differences in the type of regularities implicitly acquired

Implicit learning of natural language syntax

The present dissertation focuses on the question of how humans acquire syntactic knowledge without intending to and without awareness of what they have learned. The aim is to apply the theoretical concepts and the methodological framework provided by implicit learning research to the investigation of language acquisition. The results of six experiments are reported. In terms of design, all experiments consisted of (i) a training phase, during which subjects were trained on a miniature linguistic system by means of different exposure conditions, (ii) an unexpected testing phase, during which learning and awareness were assessed, and (iii) a debriefing session. A semi-artificial grammar, which consisted of English words and German syntax, was employed to generate the stimulus material for experiments 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6; in the case of experiment 4, nonsense syllables were used instead of English words. The linguistic focus was on verb placement rules. Native speakers of English with no background in German (or any other V2 language) were recruited to take part in the experiments.Participants in experiments 1-5 were exposed to the semi-artificial system under incidental learning conditions by means of different training tasks. In experiments 1 and 2, an auditory plausibility judgment task was used to expose participants to the stimulus sentences. In experiment 3, elicited imitations were used in addition to the plausibility judgment task. The training phase in experiment 4 consisted solely of elicited imitations, while training in experiment 5 consisted of a classification task which required participants to identify the syntactic structure of each stimulus item, followed by plausibility judgments. Participants in experiment 6, on the other hand, were exposed to the semi-artificial grammar under intentional learning conditions. These participants were told that the word order of the stimulus sentences was governed by a complex rule-system and instructed to discover syntactic rules. After training, participants in all six experiments took part in a testing phase which assessed whether learning took place and to what extent they became aware of the knowledge they had acquired. Grammaticality judgments were used as a measure of learning. Awareness was assessed by means of verbal reports, accuracy estimates, confidence ratings and source attributions. Control participants did not take part in the training phase.The results of the experiments indicate that adult learners are able to acquire syntactic structures of a novel language under both incidental and intentional learning conditions, while processing sentences for meaning, without the benefit of corrective feedback and after short vi exposure periods. That is, the findings demonstrate that the implicit learning of natural language is not restricted to infants and child learners. In addition, the experiments also show that subjects are able to transfer their knowledge to stimuli with the same underlying structure but new surface features. The measures of awareness further suggest that, in experiments 3 to 6 at least, learning resulted in both conscious and unconscious knowledge. While subjects did not become aware of all the information they have acquired, it was clear that higher levels of awareness were associated with improved performance.The findings reported in this dissertation have several implications for our understanding of language acquisition and for future research. Firstly, while the precise form of the knowledge acquired in these experiments is unclear, the findings provided no evidence for rule learning in the vast majority of subjects. It suggests that subjects in these types of experiments (and perhaps in natural language acquisition) do not acquire linguistic rules. The results support Shanks (1995; Johnstone & Shanks, 2001), who argues against the possibility of implicit rule learning. Secondly, while adults can acquire knowledge implicitly, the work reported in this dissertation also demonstrates that adult syntactic learning results predominantly in a conscious (but largely unverbalizable) knowledge base. Finally, from a methodological perspective, the results of the experiments confirm that relying on verbal reports as a measure of awareness is not sufficient. The verbal reports collected at the end of the experiment were helpful in determining what aspects of the semi-artificial grammar subjects had consciously noticed. At the same time, verbal reports were clearly not sensitive enough to assess whether subjects were aware of the knowledge they had acquired. Confidence ratings and source attributions provided a very useful method for capturing low levels of awareness and to observe the conscious status of both structural and judgment knowledge. Future experiments on language acquisition would benefit from the introduction of this relatively simple, but effective way of assessing awareness

Spring School on Language, Music, and Cognition: Organizing Events in Time

The interdisciplinary spring school “Language, music, and cognition: Organizing events in time” was held from February 26 to March 2, 2018 at the Institute of Musicology of the University of Cologne. Language, speech, and music as events in time were explored from different perspectives including evolutionary biology, social cognition, developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience of speech, language, and communication, as well as computational and biological approaches to language and music. There were 10 lectures, 4 workshops, and 1 student poster session. Overall, the spring school investigated language and music as neurocognitive systems and focused on a mechanistic approach exploring the neural substrates underlying musical, linguistic, social, and emotional processes and behaviors. In particular, researchers approached questions concerning cognitive processes, computational procedures, and neural mechanisms underlying the temporal organization of language and music, mainly from two perspectives: one was concerned with syntax or structural representations of language and music as neurocognitive systems (i.e., an intrapersonal perspective), while the other emphasized social interaction and emotions in their communicative function (i.e., an interpersonal perspective). The spring school not only acted as a platform for knowledge transfer and exchange but also generated a number of important research questions as challenges for future investigations

The role of feedback and instruction on the cross-situational learning of vocabulary and morphosyntax:Mixed effects models reveal local and global effects on acquisition

First language acquisition is implicit, in that explicit information about the language structure to be learned is not provided to children. Instead, they must acquire both vocabulary and grammar incrementally, by generalizing across multiple situations that eventually enable links between words in utterances and referents in the environment to be established. However, this raises a problem of how vocabulary can be acquired without first knowing the role of the word within the syntax of a sentence. It also raises practical issues about the extent to which different instructional conditions – about grammar in advance of learning or feedback about correct decisions during learning – might influence second language acquisition of implicitly experienced information about the language. In an artificial language learning study, we studied participants learning language from inductive exposure, but under different instructional conditions. Language learners were exposed to complex utterances and complex scenes and had to determine the meaning and the grammar of the language from these co-occurrences with environmental scenes. We found that learning was boosted by explicit feedback, but not by explicit instruction about the grammar of the language, compared to an implicit learning condition. However, the effect of feedback was not general across all aspects of the language. Feedback improved vocabulary, but did not affect syntax learning. We further investigated the local, contextual effects on learning, and found that previous knowledge of vocabulary within an utterance improved learning but that this was driven only by certain grammatical categories in the language. The results have implications for theories of second language learning informed by our understanding of first language acquisition as well as practical implications for learning instruction and optimal, contingent adjustment of learners’ environment during their learning

Collocational processing in typologically different languages, English and Turkish: : Evidence from corpora and psycholinguistic experimentation

Unlike the traditional words-and-rules approach to language processing (Pinker, 1999), usage-based models of language have emphasised the role of multi-word sequences (Christiansen & Chater, 2016b; Ellis, 2002). Various psycholinguistic experiments have demonstrated that multi-word sequences (MWS) are processed quantitatively faster than novel phrases by both L1 and L2 speakers (e.g. Arnon & Snider, 2010; Wolter & Yamashita, 2018). Collocations, a specific type of MWS, hold a prominent position in psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics and language pedagogy research. (Gablasova, Brezina, McEnery, 2017a). In this dissertation, I explored the processing of adjective-noun collocations in Turkish and English by L1 speakers of these languages through a corpus-based study and psycholinguistic experiments. Turkish is an agglutinating language with a rich morphology, it is therefore valid to ask if agglutinating structure of Turkish affects collocational processing in L1 Turkish and whether the same factors affect the processing of collocations in English and Turkish. In addition, this study looked at L1 and L2 processing of collocations in English. This thesis firstly has investigated the frequency counts and associations statistics of English and Turkish adjective-noun collocations through a corpus-based analysis of general reference corpora of English and Turkish. The corpus study showed that unlemmatised collocations, which does not take into account the inflected forms of the collocations, have similar mean frequency and association counts in the both languages. This suggests that the base forms – uninflected forms of the collocations in English and Turkish do not appear to have notably different frequency and association counts from each other. To test the effect of agglutinating structure of Turkish on the collocability of adjectives and nouns, the lemmatised forms of the collocations in the both languages were examined. In other words, collocations in the two languages were lemmatised. The lemmatisation brings the benefit of including the frequency counts of both the base and inflected forms of the collocations. The findings indicated that the vast majority (%75) of the lemmatised Turkish adjective-noun combinations occur at a higher-frequency than their English equivalents. In addition, agglutinating structure of Turkish appears to increase adjective-noun collocations’ association scores in the both frequency bands since the vast majority of Turkish collocations reach higher scores of collocational strengths than their unlemmatised forms. After the corpus study, I designed psycholinguistic experiments to explore the sensitivity of speakers of these languages to the frequency of adjectives, nouns and whole collocations in acceptability judgment tasks in English and Turkish. Mixed-effects regression modelling revealed that collocations which have similar collocational frequency and association scores are processed at comparable speeds in English and Turkish by L1 speakers of these languages. That is to say, both Turkish and English speakers are sensitive to the collocation frequency counts. This finding is in line with many previous empirical studies that language users process MWS quantitively faster than control phrases (e.g. Arnon & Snider, 2010; McDonald & Shillcock, 2003; Vilkaite, 2016). However, lemmatised collocation frequency counts affected the processing of Turkish and English collocations differently, and Turkish speakers appeared to attend to word-level frequency counts of collocations to a lesser extent than English speakers. These findings suggest that different mechanisms underlie L1 processing of English and Turkish collocations. The present study also looked at the sensitivity of L1 and L2 advanced speakers to the frequency of adjectives, nouns and whole collocations in English. Mixed-effects regression modelling revealed that L2 advanced speakers are sensitive to the collocation frequency counts like L1 English speakers because as the collocation frequency counts increased, L1 Turkish-English L2 speakers responded to the collocations in English more quickly, as L1 English speakers did. The results indicated that both groups showed sensitivity to noun frequency counts, and L2 English advanced speakers did not appear to rely on the noun frequency scores more heavily than the L1 English group while processing adjective-noun collocations. These findings are in conflict with the claims that L2 speakers process MWS differently than L1 speakers (Wray, 2002)

Evidence from cross-situational statistical learning

UIDB/03213/2020 UIDP/03213/2020Adults often encounter difficulty perceiving and processing sounds of a second language (L2). In order to acquire word-meaning mappings, learners need to determine what the language-relevant phonological contrasts are in the language. In this study, we examined the influence of phonology on non-native word learning, determining whether the language-relevant phonological contrasts could be acquired by abstracting over multiple experiences, and whether awareness of these contrasts could be related to learning. We trained English- and Mandarin-native speakers with pseudowords via a cross-situational statistical learning task (CSL). Learners were able to acquire the phonological contrasts across multiple situations, but similar-sounding words (i.e., minimal pairs) were harder to acquire, and words that contrast in a non-native suprasegmental feature (i.e., Mandarin lexical tone) were even harder for English-speakers, even with extended exposure. Furthermore, awareness of the non-native phonology was not found to relate to learning.publishersversionepub_ahead_of_prin

Collocational Processing in L1 and L2: The Effects of Word Frequency, Collocational Frequency, and Association

This study investigated the effects of individual word frequency, collocational frequency, and association on L1 and L2 collocational processing. An acceptability judgment task was administered to L1 and L2 speakers of English. Response times were analyzed using mixed‐effects modeling for 3 types of adjective–noun pairs: (a) high‐frequency, (b) low‐frequency, and (c) baseline items. This study extends previous research by examining whether the effects of individual word and collocation frequency counts differ for L1 and L2 speakers’ processing of collocations. This study also compared the extent to which L1 and L2 speakers’ response times are affected by mutual information and log Dice scores, which are corpus‐derived association measures. Both groups of participants demonstrated sensitivity to individual word and collocation frequency counts. However, there was a reduced effect of individual word frequency counts for processing high‐frequency collocations compared to low‐frequency collocations. Both groups of participants were similarly sensitive to the association measures used