Applied Psycholinguistics

Table of Contents - October 2012 - Volume 33, Issue 04  

Articles

Implicit and explicit knowledge in second language acquisition

PATRICK REBUSCHATa1 c1 and JOHN N. WILLIAMSa2

a1 University of Cambridge and Georgetown University

a2 University of Cambridge

ABSTRACT

Language development is frequently characterized as a process where learning proceeds implicitly, that is, incidentally and in absence of awareness of what was learned. This article reports the results of two experiments that investigated whether second language acquisition can also result in implicit knowledge. Adult learners were trained on an artificial language under incidental learning conditions and then tested by means of grammaticality judgments and subjective measures of awareness. The results indicate that incidental exposure to second language syntax can result in unconscious knowledge, which suggests that at least some of the learning in this experiment was implicit. At the same time, however, it was also found that conscious (but unverbalizable) knowledge was clearly linked to improved performance in the grammaticality judgment task.

(Received September 17 2009)

(Accepted March 14 2011)

Correspondence:

c1 ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Patrick Rebuschat, Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University, 37th and O Streets, NW, Washington, DC 20057. E-mail: per6@georgetown.edu

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