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SUMMARY:Incidental learning of word order regularities: How abstract and h
 ow implicit? - Dr John Williams\, RCEAL\, University of Cambridge
DTSTART:20100126T160000Z
DTEND:20100126T173000Z
UID:TALK21999@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Chris Cummins
DESCRIPTION:The artificial grammar learning paradigm is popular within exp
 erimental psychology as a means of studying the incidental acquisition of 
 sequence knowledge.  There has been considerable debate over whether the k
 nowledge that is acquired can be described in terms of abstract rules and 
 whether it is truly implicit.  The same questions are relevant to the acqu
 isition of word order regularities in a second language.  I shall describe
  two sets of studies that used a novel paradigm to explore these issues.  
 Participants were exposed to sentences comprising L1 (English) lexis but w
 ord order patterns from an unknown language (Japanese or German) in a mean
 ing-focused task.  Subsequent performance in a grammaticality judgment tas
 k showed that participants had incidentally acquired the abstract syntacti
 c patterns underlying the sentences they had been exposed to\, but not the
  generalised rules that one might have expected to be licensed by these se
 ntence patterns.  Subjective measures of awareness showed that grammatical
 ity judgments were at least in part driven by unconscious knowledge and in
 tuition\, and on-line performance measures revealed knowledge of sequentia
 l structure in the absence of awareness of grammaticality.  Therefore\, wo
 rd order regularities can be learned incidentally\, the resulting knowledg
 e can be partially implicit\, but there are limitations on the generality 
 of what is learned.
LOCATION:GR-06/07\, English Faculty Building
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