GENERALIZABILITY AND AUTOMATICITY OF SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING UNDER IMPLICIT, INCIDENTAL, ENHANCED, AND INSTRUCTED CONDITIONS

Abstract

This experimental study examines the extent to which 60 adult Japanese ESL learners were able to acquire a rule regulating the argument structure frames of novel verbs of English after exposure to grammatical examples of sentences containing the verbs. Training took place under conditions with no focus on form (implicit and incidental conditions) and with focus on form (enhanced and instructed conditions). The presentation of instances during training was manipulated as a test of predictions made by Logan's (1988, 1990, 1992) memory-based instance theory of automaticity. Results measured in reaction times show similar slopes for automaticity on trained examples in each condition but significant differences in the extent of learning, with the focus on form conditions outperforming the no focus on form conditions in transfer of learned knowledge to accurate judgments of new ungrammatical sentences. Implications are drawn from the results regarding the acquisition of rule-based versus memory-based knowledge from exposure to stimuli in each training condition and the influence of this knowledge on decision-making about grammaticality during the transfer task.