Language adaptation and learning: Getting explicit about implicit learning

Abstract

Linguistic adaptation is a phenomenon where language representations change in response to linguistic input. Adaptation can occur on multiple linguistic levels such as phonology (tuning of phonotactic constraints), words (repetition priming), and syntax (structural priming). The persistent nature of these adaptations suggests that they may be a form of implicit learning and connectionist models have been developed which instantiate this hypothesis. Research on implicit learning, however, has also produced evidence that explicit chunk knowledge is involved in the performance of these tasks. In this review, we examine how these interacting implicit and explicit processes may change our understanding of language learning and processing.

The P-chain: relating sentence production and its disorders to comprehension and acquisition

“…The implicit learning that is revealed in structural priming and sequence learning studies is claimed to be an important mechanism for how linguistic skill changes over time [31,34,35]. It is the mechanism for how the mature system adapts to specific contexts and speakers and, it is claimed, ultimately for how the child acquires the system.…”

Interactive alignment: A teaching-friendly view of second language pronunciation learning

“…In social psychology, for instance, mimicry (verbal, facial, emotional, and behavioural repetition) has been long regarded as an automatic and implicit phenomenon of social behavior (Chartrand & Dalton 2008). And in the field of cognitive psychology, the unconscious repetition of language patterns experienced in recent discourse (shown as priming effects) is considered an automatic and implicit language learning mechanism (Ferreira & Bock 2006;Chang, Janciauskas & Fitz 2012). Thus, the involvement of implicit learning in linguistic alignment is established.…”

The effect of anomalous utterances on language production

“…It could stem from changes of speakers' linguistic knowledge, instantiated by encoding novel verbs and establishing links between these verbs (or intransitive verbs) and ditransitive structures (henceforth encoding account; Pickering and Branigan, 1998). It could also stem from a transient episodic memory trace, which does not change speakers' linguistic knowledge (henceforth episodic memory account; Chang et al, 2006;Chang et al, 2012). Although, as previously noted, our main purpose here was not to distinguish between these accounts, the data may be consistent with aspects of both.…”

“…On the other hand, the lexical boost could be a fundamentally different phenomenon than syntactic priming itself, and come about as a result of a fleeting trace of a just-experienced sentence in episodic memory (Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006;Chang, Janciauskas, & Fitz, 2012).…”