Triangulating Measures of Awareness

Abstract

Williams’s (2005) study on “learning without awareness” and three subsequent extensions (Faretta-Stutenberg & Morgan-Short, 2011; Hama & Leow, 2010; Rebuschat, Hamrick, Sachs, Riestenberg, & Ziegler, 2013) have reported conflicting results, perhaps in part due to differences in how awareness has been measured. The present extension of Williams (2005) addresses this possibility directly by triangulating data from three awareness measures: concurrent verbal reports (think-aloud protocols), retrospective verbal reports (postexposure interviews), and subjective measures (confidence ratings and source attributions). Participants were exposed to an artificial determiner system under incidental learning conditions. One experimental group thought aloud during training, another thought aloud during training and testing, and a third remained silent, as did a trained control group. All participants were then tested by means of a forced-choice task to establish whether learning took place. In addition, all participants provided confidence ratings and source attributions on test items and were interviewed following the test. Our results indicate that, although all experimental groups displayed learning effects, only the silent group was able to generalize the acquired knowledge to novel instances. Comparisons of concurrent and retrospective verbal report data shed light on the conflicting findings previously reported in the literature and highlight important methodological issues in implicit and explicit learning research.

Should We Listen or Read? Modality Effects in Implicit and Explicit Knowledge

“…These findings underscore two points: First, verbal elicitation may be an effective practice activity. Other studies that have used verbal elicitations (e.g., Hama & Leow, ; Leung & Williams, ; Rebuschat et al, ; Rogers, Révész, & Rebuschat, ) have also found notable learning effects, suggesting that memorizing and recalling input sentences may facilitate subsequent internalization of the input. Second, this study brought potential modality effects to the fore.…”

“…Learning resulted in explicit knowledge M = 52.9% (SD = 4.5) b Rebuschat et al (2015) Four artificial determiners (gi, ro, ul, ne) Note. WMT = word monitoring test; N = noun; D = determiner; Adj = adjective; V2 = verb second; VF = verb final; V1 = verb first; Exp = Experiment; dʹ = d prime score; M = mean score; SD = standard deviation.…”

Implicit and explicit knowledge of inflectional morphology

“…In short, the studies listed above, which have included subjective measures of awareness in their experimental design, are reflective of the renewed attention in L2 research toward the incidental learning of L2 grammar as well as the type of knowledge that is developed as a result of incidental exposure. However, most of the research carried out in this arena has so far addressed the incidental learning of L2 word order (e.g., Rebuschat & Williams, 2012; Williams & Kuribara, 2008) or noun–determiner systems (e.g., Hama & Leow, 2010; Leung & Williams, 2011, 2012; Rebuschat et al, 2013; Williams, 2005). To date, very little research has investigated the learning of L2 inflectional morphology resulting from incidental exposure with the aim of examining whether the resulting knowledge was implicit or explicit in nature (see Grey et al, 2014, for an exception).…”

Feature-focusing constraints on implicit learning of function word and meaning associations

“…In addition, participants claimed to be unaware of any hidden meanings. This study provided the first demonstration that articlemeaning connections can be learned across trials without awareness of the hidden regularities, and has since been replicated (e.g., Leung & Williams, 2011;Rebuschat, Hamrick, Riestenberg, Sachs, & Ziegler, 2015).…”