Revisiting attending to form during meaning comprehension in learning Spanish as an additional foreign language

Abstract

AbstractThe current replication study aims to examine the effects of learners' attention to lexical and grammatical forms on meaning comprehension while listening to a passage in Spanish. The registered protocol and materials in the aural mode from Morgan‐Short et al.'s (2018) multisite replication study were used, with first language (L1) Chinese–second language (L2) English participants (N = 122) learning Spanish as the third language (L3). The results partially reproduced the previous findings that there was no effect of attending to a lexical item (sol) on meaning comprehension. However, a small to medium effect was found on comprehension scores for simultaneously attending to a grammatical form (la). This finding reveals a site‐specific effect with learners from different L1 backgrounds, suggesting that learners' attending to a grammatical form absent in their L1 is detrimental to their meaning comprehension even if this form exists in their earlier learned L2.