Werkgroep Over Taal (WOT)

20 May 2022: Presentation by Georgia Knell (VUB) 

15 June 2022: Presentation by Lisa Hilte (UA)

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• All WOT-seminars take place in the professorenzaal 5.C.402., unless announced otherwise. 
• Note: during midday sessions, a small lunch is provided, if the session is in the afternoon we offer coffee and cake. 

Abstract of Georgia Knell - presentation on May 20th 2022 

What the eyes don't see, the mind won't learn: Investigating the role of salience in the initial processing of morphology in SLA

The cognitive mechanisms of attention and awareness are believed to play a crucial role in second language acquisition (SLA; cf. Schmidt 1990), but still little is known about their exact role therewithin. Many factors have been proposed to influence a learner’s attention to and awareness of new linguistic forms in a second language (L2), some of which are endogenous, i.e., consciously applied by the learner, and some of which are exogenous, i.e., resulting from factors outside the learner’s control. The latter determine the form’s salience. While some researchers have theorized about the impact of salience on attention, awareness and acquisition in SLA (e.g., Goldschneider & DeKeyser 2001), there are still few empirical studies that directly investigate the influence of salience on L2 processes. From the literature, we have selected particular operationalizations of salience that my impact attention to a particular grammatical form (Ellis, 2016; Simoens et al, 2018) and hypothesize that forms with greater degrees of salience lead to greater attention, awareness, and consequently, acquisition of the form.

The present research aims to initiate a systematic empirical investigation of the effect of various factors of salience on SLA. To this end, we will conduct three experiments that consider a selection of factors hypothesized to determine the salience of L2 features. In each experiment, we analyze participants’ eye movements as they read short texts in a semiartificial language called Englishti, which incorporates into the grammar of English two artificial morphemes, o and olp, which are manipulated in specific ways in each experiment to reflect the salience factor(s) in question for that experiment. Eye movements reveal how the degree of salience of the form interacts with the attention learners allocate to it. A retrospective interview measures the level of awareness learners have of the new form and its meaning. Within each experiment, we also consider how the influence of salience is mediated by individual learner variables, using a series of pretests measuring working memory and language aptitude, as well as implicit vs. explicit learning contexts, using questions after each sentence pertaining either to its comprehension (implicit) or its grammaticality (explicit).

Through this series of experiments that together consider the isolated and interactional effects of various types of salience in combination with learner- and context-specific variables, we expect to develop a more robust understanding of the nature and role of salience in SLA and how this can be applied to improve real-world language learning.

References

Ellis, N. (2016). Salience, cognition, language complexity, and complex adaptive systems. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 38(2), 341–351.

Goldschneider, J., & DeKeyser, R. (2001). Explaining the “natural order of L2 morpheme acquisition” in English: A meta-analysis of multiple determinants. Language Learning, 51(1), 1–50.

Schmidt, R. (1990). The role of consciousness in second language learning. Applied Linguistics, 11(2), 129–158.

Simoens, H., et al. (2018). The effect of perceptual salience on processing L2 inflectional morphology. In S. M. Gass, P. Spinner, & J. Behney (Eds.), Salience in Second Language Acquisition (pp. 107–130). New York: Routledge.