ERIC Number: EJ992470
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2012-Oct
Pages: 28
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0142-7164
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Implicit and Explicit Knowledge in Second Language Acquisition
Rebuschat, Patrick; Williams, John N.
Applied Psycholinguistics, v33 n4 p829-856 Oct 2012
Language development is frequently characterized as a process where learning proceeds implicitly, that is, incidentally and in absence of awareness of what was learned. This article reports the results of two experiments that investigated whether second language acquisition can also result in implicit knowledge. Adult learners were trained on an artificial language under incidental learning conditions and then tested by means of grammaticality judgments and subjective measures of awareness. The results indicate that incidental exposure to second language syntax can result in unconscious knowledge, which suggests that at least some of the learning in this experiment was implicit. At the same time, however, it was also found that conscious (but unverbalizable) knowledge was clearly linked to improved performance in the grammaticality judgment task.
Descriptors: Learning Processes, Language Acquisition, Second Languages, Language Tests, Adult Learning, Adult Students, Syntax, Artificial Languages, Incidental Learning, Psycholinguistics, Language Processing, Second Language Learning, Experiments
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Adult Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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