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CONFLICTING EVIDENCE OF EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT KNOWLEDGE FROM OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE MEASURES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 November 2019

Ryo Maie*
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
Robert M. DeKeyser
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Ryo Maie, Michigan State University, B220 Wells Hall, 619 Red Cedar Road, East Lansing, MI 48824. E-mail: maieryo@msu.edu

Abstract

This study is the first to compare objective and subjective measures of explicit and implicit knowledge under learning from incidental exposure. An experiment was conducted, during which L1 English speakers were trained on a semiartificial language, Japlish. A measure of explicit knowledge and a recently proposed measure of implicit knowledge (i.e., an untimed auditory grammaticality judgment and a word-monitoring task) were applied to gauge the two types of knowledge at two testing sessions, and their results were compared with those of subjective measures of awareness. Results revealed clear discrepancies between the two measurement approaches in terms of their sensitivity. In particular, while the subjective measures varied in identifying explicit and implicit knowledge of various Japlish constructions, the objective measures indicated that most of the knowledge was explicit, and development of implicit knowledge (measured by the word-monitoring task) was minimal, only manifested in detecting a case-missing violation at the delayed posttest. The results are discussed with reference to the current literature on explicit and implicit learning and knowledge, and it is concluded that the criterion of (un)awareness might not be by itself sufficient to provide a full account of L2 knowledge developed under incidental conditions.

Type
Research Article
Open Practices
Open materials
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers as well as the journal editor, Dr. Susan Gass, for their constructive feedback on the earlier drafts of the paper. This article is based on the original master’s thesis of the first author, supported by the Program in Second Language Acquisition at the University of Maryland, College Park. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Drs. Michael Long and Steven Ross for their insightful suggestions on the thesis and Dr. Yuichi Suzuki, Dr. Amelia Lambelet, and Wei Yi for their comments on the earlier drafts of the paper. The earlier version of this piece was presented at Second Language Research Forum 2018 at Université du Québec à Montréal. All errors remain our own and any questions regarding the paper should be addressed to the corresponding author.

The experiment in this article earned an Open Materials badge for transparent practices. The materials are available at https://www.iris-database.org/iris/app/home/detail?id=york%3a936167.

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