IMPLICIT LEARNING IN THE CROWD

Abstract

AbstractA growing field of research has made use of a semiartificial language paradigm to investigate the role of awareness in L2 acquisition. A central and empirically still unresolved issue in this field concerns the possibility of learning implicitly, that is, without intention to learn and without awareness of what has been learned. Up until now, studies on implicit learning have mainly been conducted in laboratory settings under highly controlled conditions with university students as participants. The present study investigated whether and to what extent the results obtained in such settings can be extrapolated to the general population. Building on Williams (2005), we designed two crowdsourcing experiments that examined the learning of novel form-meaning mappings under incidental conditions in 163 participants. Our design allowed us to disentangle the effects of awareness at the level of noticing and understanding. The results of the two experiments demonstrated the implicit learning effect outside the lab in a more varied sample of participants and indicated that awareness at both levels appears to have a facilitative effect on learning outcomes.