Implicit learning in foreign language acquisition

Abstract

Lexical stress is critical in word recognition and speech segmentation. Implicit learning of lexical stress during the first stages of foreign language acquisition (FLA) was examined using a lexical decision task. Spanish words that followed a lexical stress rule—trochaic stress for words ending with vowels and iambic stress for words ending with consonants—were presented aurally to English-speaking participants, who subsequently had to discriminate between new Spanish words and nonwords. Although participants were not able to explicitly explain the lexical rule and attributed more of their responses to intuition judgments than to guessing, results showed that Spanish lexical stress was implicitly learned and used in lexical decision, despite word meaning being unavailable. Lexical stress cues seem to be acquired automatically by exposure to a foreign language, highlighting the importance of listening tasks for FLA. Such learning might be further exploited during foreign word recognition and speech segmentation.