Implicit Statistical Learning in Naturalistic and Instructed Morphosyntactic Attainment: An Aptitude‐Treatment Interaction Design

Cylcia Bolibaugh,Pauline Foster

doi:10.1111/lang.12465

Abstract

AbstractWe investigated the potential influence of implicit learning mechanisms on L2 morphosyntactic attainment by examining the relationship between age of onset (AoO), two cognitive abilities hypothesized to underlie implicit learning (phonological short‐term memory and implicit statistical learning), and performance on an auditory grammaticality judgment test (GJT). Participants were 71 Polish‐English long‐term bilinguals with a wide range of AoOs (1–35 years) who differed in their context of learning and use (immersed vs. instructed). In immersed learners, we observed a growing dissociation between performance on grammatical and ungrammatical sentences as AoO was delayed. This effect was attenuated in those with better phonological short‐term memory and statistical learning abilities and is consistent with a decline in the ability to learn from implicit negative evidence. In instructed learners, GJT performance was subject to additive effects of AoO and grammaticality and was not associated with either cognitive predictor, suggesting that implicit learning mechanisms were not involved.

Highlights

Understanding why age of onset (AoO) is negatively correlated with language attainment represents one of the most substantive empirical problems of second language acquisition (SLA)
One well-established interpretation is that age effects reflect the loss of implicit learning ability (DeKeyser, 2000; Paradis, 2009), with the strongest form of the proposal entailing a qualitative shift in learning mechanisms in childhood: “[S]omewhere between the ages of 6−7 and 16−17, everybody loses the mental equipment required for the implicit induction of the abstract patterns underlying a human language” (DeKeyser, 2000, p. 518)
We begin by reviewing criteria that have been used to diagnose implicit knowledge and consider evidence for implicit learning from laboratory studies that have used similar tests to those used in studies of ultimate attainment before we review the growing validation literature to address the possibility of measuring implicit knowledge via grammaticality judgment test (GJT)

Summary

Introduction

Understanding why age of onset (AoO) is negatively correlated with language attainment represents one of the most substantive empirical problems of second language acquisition (SLA). Granena’s report of associations between early- and late-onset second language (L2) learners’ morphosyntactic attainment and probabilistic sequence learning—an inductive statistical learning mechanism proposed to underlie native language acquisition (Erickson & Thiessen, 2015; Jimenez, 2003)—raises further challenges for the fundamental difference account. We begin by reviewing criteria that have been used to diagnose implicit knowledge and consider evidence for implicit learning from laboratory studies that have used similar tests to those used in studies of ultimate attainment before we review the growing validation literature to address the possibility of measuring implicit knowledge via GJTs. We contextualize our design by examining findings from two interactions (AoO with learning context and AoO with aptitude) that have been used to make claims about the scope and provenance of age effects in L2 learning, and we assess the extent to which they support claims of qualitative differences between child and adult L2 learning. It is a combination of systematicity and automaticity that underlies two key behavioral hallmarks of implicit language knowledge, namely, that “[p]eople have fluent and productive command of their native language and are able to instantly detect grammatical irregularities, without being able to explain the underlying rules” (Williams, 2009, p. 319)

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