Collaborative Research: Learned Attention, Blocking, and Transfer in Language Acquisition

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

Most adult learners cannot attain native competence in a second language. Scholars have proposed various accounts for this limited attainment of older learners compared to young children, including critical periods for language acquisition, sociocultural differences, motivational effects, and restricted language input. Such accounts have profoundly different implications for second language instruction, its likely success, and the best means of attaining it. This research project considers alternative explanations in terms of cognitive principles of learning and transfer, in particular, attentional processes in the associative learning of form-meaning relations for linguistic constructions. The investigators will examine the learning phenomena of salience, cue redundancy, and the attentional blocking of later experienced cues by earlier ones, and how individual differences in working memory capacity modulates these effects. This is an highly integrative research exercise, bridging the psychologies of learning and development, cognitive science, linguistics, language acquisition, and education. The interdisciplinary nature of the research relies on a variety of convergent methods: laboratory learning of temporal reference in a small subset of Latin under experimental conditions, eye-movement studies of attention in reading second language Spanish, analyses of development in regular university Spanish foreign language courses, training studies, and the development of classroom or lab-based foreign language instructional interventions. Findings from this research will provide: (1) important theoretical insights into psychological processes of learned attention and transfer in second language acquisition, uniting the psychology of learning and second language acquisition in developing instruction-relevant, cognitive rather than biological, explanations of limited second language attainment; (2) detailed interdisciplinary understandings of these mechanisms as they occur both in naturalistic second language acquisition and in instructed foreign language courses; (3) forms of second language training that are based on these theoretical understandings; and (4) evaluations of the instructional efficacy of these practices.