Learning second language morphosyntax in dialogue under explicit and implicit conditions: An experimental study with advanced adult learners of German

Abstract

We investigate the role of awareness in learning non-salient grammar features in a second language during oral interaction. We conducted a learning experiment during which forty-eight adult Dutch-speaking advanced learners of German and a native German-speaking experimenter engaged in a scripted oral dialogue game. The experimenter and learner in turn produced sentences based on pictures eliciting German strong verbs with stem-vowel alternations, a morphosyntactic feature that represents a persistent learning difficulty. While learners in the implicit condition were merely instructed to focus on sentence meaning, learners in the explicit condition were encouraged to also pay attention to and learn from the target structure in the experimenter's input. Although the explicit group achieved higher accuracy scores overall, both groups had similar (absolute) learning gains, showing that oral input provided during interactive exchanges can lead to substantial learning not only under explicit, learning-targeted conditions, but also without an explicit directive to learn.

The predictive processing of number information in subregular verb morphology in a first and second language

“…To date, only a limited number of studies has found positive evidence for morphosyntax-based prediction in adult L2 sentence processing (e.g., Curcic et al, 2019;Trenkic et al, 2014), and some studies found negative evidence (e.g., gender: Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2010;case: Hopp, 2015;Mitsugi, 2017). That we found prediction in L2 speakers is therefore noteworthy, given the learning and processing difficulties that strong conjugation represents in L2 learners, particularly when their L1 is Dutch (Koch et al, 2023). The learners' advanced proficiency level potentially played an important role in this respect (see Grüter et al, 2017;Hopp, 2013); perhaps the results would have looked different in learners with lower proficiency.…”

“…Several studies (Godfroid, 2016;Godfroid & Uggen, 2013;Koch et al, 2023;Krause et al, 2015) that have used the vowel change as their target structure provide evidence for its persistent learning difficulty and found the vowel-change-free weak paradigm to be the default conjugation system in learners' interlanguages. It is a challenge for learners to create and store solid, correct morphological representations of the stem variants with the changed vowels and to map them onto the correct morphosyntactic properties; the coexisting, incorrect default representations with unchanged vowels compete with and easily overrule these target representations.…”

“…Crucially, Dutch also has a strong conjugation paradigm involving stem alternations in past tense forms, and many verbs are cognates in both languages. Yet, Dutch strong verbs never have alternating stems in PRES (see Table 1), potentially causing negative L1-L2 transfer involving blocking effects (Ellis, 2006), which makes it particularly difficult for Dutch speakers to fully master the strong conjugation paradigm (see Koch et al, 2023). That is, learners first learn the association between 3SG PRES and the regular -t suffix, which matches their L1 and therefore allows for direct positive L1-L2 transfer; subsequently, it may be more taxing for them to learn at a later stage that stem vowels of strong verbs also constitute a cue for the same morphosyntactic information, because the firstly learned cue "overshadows" the new cue.…”