Nick C. Ellis

At the Interface: Dynamic Interactions of Explicit and Implicit Language Knowledge.

This paper considers how implicit and explicit knowledge are dissociable but cooperative. It reviews various psychological and neurobiological processes by which explicit knowledge of form-meaning associations impacts upon implicit language learning. The interface is dynamic: It happens transiently during conscious processing, but the influence upon implicit cognition endures thereafter. The primary conscious involvement in SLA is the explicit learning involved in the initial registration of pattern recognizers for constructions that are then tuned and integrated into the system by implicit learning during subsequent input processing. Neural systems in the prefrontal cortex involved in working memory provide attentional selection, perceptual integration, and the unification of consciousness. Neural systems in the hippocampus then bind these disparate cortical representations into unitary episodic representations. These are the mechanisms by which Schmidts ( 1990 ) noticing helps solve Quines ( 1960 ) problem of referential indeterminacy. Explicit memories can also guide the conscious building of novel linguistic utterances through processes of analogy. Formulas, slot-and-frame patterns, drills, and declarative pedagogical grammar rules all contribute to the conscious creation of utterances whose subsequent usage promotes implicit learning and proceduralization. Flawed output can prompt focused feedback by way of recasts that present learners with psycholinguistic data ready for explicit analysis. Other processes of acquisition from output include differentiation, analysis, and preemption. These processes of conscious construction in working memory underpin relationships between individual differences in working memory capacities and language learning aptitude. Thanks to Rod Ellis for first suggesting that I try to write this and to the staff and students at Department of Applied Language Studies and Linguistics University of Auckland (2003), the TESOL Program Temple University Japan (2003), the Chester Language Development Reading Group, and the LOT winter school (2004) for helping me think it through. I am particularly grateful to Michel Paradis, Michael Swan, Karen Roehr, Anne Feryok, and Tamar Keren-Portnoy for pointing their giant biological cameras of consciousness at a prior draft, and for sharing their awareness with me in kindly and constructive fashion. I have learned a lot from it.

Implicit and explicit learning of languages

Implicit and explicit language learning - an overview the unruly world of language the input hypothesis and its rivals a theory of instructed second language acquisition implicit learning and the acquisition of natural languages implicit and explicit learning of complex tasks implicit learning and the cognitive unconscious - of artificial grammars and SLA vocabulary acquisition - the implicit ins and outs of explicit cognitive mediation second language vocabulary learning - the role of implicit processes animal learning and the implicit/explicit distinction - or why what we think of as explicit for us can be implicit for them differences between animal and human learning - implicit and explicit processes language learner and learning strategies neurolinguistic aspects of implicit and explicit memory - implications for bilingualism and SLA connectionism and second language acquisition universal grammar and L1 acquisition the metaphor of access to universal grammar in L2 learning universal grammar and language learnability the lure and language of implicit memory - a developmental perspective representation and ways of knowing - three issues in second language acquisition.

The specificity of autobiographical memory and imageability of the future

Three studies examined whether the specificity with which people retrieve episodes from their past determines the specificity with which they imagine the future. In the first study, suicidal patients and nondepressed controls generated autobiographical events and possible future events in response to cues. Suicidal subjects’ memory and future responses were more generic, and specificity level for the past and the future was significantly correlated for both groups. In the second and third studies, the effect of experimental manipulation of retrieval style was examined by instructing subjects to retrieve specific events or summaries of events from their past (Experiment 2) or by giving high- or lowimageable words to cue memories (Experiment 3). Results showed that induction of a generic retrieval style reduced the specificity of images of the future. It is suggested that the association between memory retrieval and future imaging arises because the intermediate descriptions used in searching autobiographical memory are also used to generate images of possible events in the future.

Working Memory in the Acquisition of Vocabulary and Syntax: Putting Language in Good Order

This paper argues that working memory is heavily involved in language acquisition as (a) a major part of language learning is the learning of sequences, (b) working memory allows short-term maintenance of sequence information, and (c) short-term rehearsal of sequences promotes the consolidation of long-term memories of language sequences. It first reviews evidence supporting this position. Next it presents an experiment that demonstrates that subjects encouraged to rehearse foreign language (FL) utterances are better than both silent controls and subjects who are prevented from rehearsal by articulatory suppression at (a) learning to comprehend and translate FL words and phrases, (b) explicit metalinguistic knowledge of the detailed content of grammatical regularities, (c) acquisition of the FL forms of words and phrases, (d) accuracy in FL pronunciation, and (e) some aspects of productive (but not receptive) grammatical fluency and accuracy. Finally, it describes possible mechanisms underlying these effects.

Emergentism, Connectionism and Language Learning

This review summarizes a range of theoretical approaches to language acquisition. It argues that language representations emerge from interactions at all levels from brain to society. Simple learning mechanisms, operating in and across the human systems for perception, motor-action and cognition as they are exposed to language data as part of a social environment, suffice to drive the emergence of complex language representations. Connectionism provides a set of computational tools for exploring the conditions under which emergent properties arise. I present various simulations of emergence of linguistic regularity for illustration.

Rules and instances in foreign language learning: Interactions of explicit and implicit knowledge

Abstract This paper reports a study of implicit and explicit learning of second language (L2) grammatical forms, the “soft”-mutations of Welsh. “Random” learners saw randomly ordered instances. “Rule” learners first learned the rules. “Rule&Instances” learners saw the rules applied to instances. Initial learning, generalisations to new words and constructions, implicit fast performance in a well-formedness RT decision task, and explicit knowledge of the rules were recorded. Analyses of over 71,000 language trials demonstrate: (1) “Random” learners quickly achieve competence on original learning material, but show little implicit learning, performing poorly on well-formedness (or “grammaticality”) judgements, and have poor acquisition of explicit knowledge of the underlying rule-structure. (2) “Rule” learners take many trials to learn the rules but this facilitates their understanding of the natural language. However, they often know rules explicitly, yet fail to apply them in practice. Explicit and implic...

Factors affecting the learning of foreign language vocabulary: Imagery keyword mediators and phonological short-term memory

In order to investigate the cognitive processes involved in learning Foreign Language (FL) vocabulary, this study evaluates different methods of instruction. It demonstrates that keyword techniques are effective for receptive learning but that repetition is a superior strategy for learning to produce the foreign word. Performance is optimal when learners combine both strategies. The nature of the keyword is crucial–-whereas imageable noun keywords promote learning, verb keywords actually impede it. A theoretical analysis of the roles of phonological short-term memory, imagery, and lexical factors in FL vocabulary learning is presented.

Psychology of Foreign Language Vocabulary Acquisition: Implications for CALL

Abstract This review summarises current cognitive psychological knowledge concerning vocabulary acquisition and discusses implications for the development of effective computer assisted vocabulary acquisition methods. It argues that there are several aspects of vocabulary acquisition which involve qualitatively different learning processes: (1) acquisition of cognitive mechanisms for pattern recognition of written or spoken word forms, as well as of mechanisms for the production of spoken or written word forms ‐ this involves implicit learning processes in specialised input and output modules. In contrast, (2) acquisition of word meanings requires explicit (conscious) learning processes with deep processing strategies like semantic elaboration and imagery mediation resulting in better acquisition.

Developmental and acquired dyslexia: A comparison.

Abstract Jorm (1979a) has drawn attention to similarities between developmental dyslexia and acquired deep dyslexia, an analogy which has been criticized by A. W. Ellis (1979). A series of three experiments compared the two syndromes, using the techniques applied by Patterson and Marcel (1977) to adult deep dyslexics, to study a group of 15 boys suffering from developmental dyslexia. Patterson and Marcels patients were able to perform a lexical decision task but showed no evidence of phonemic encoding of nonwords; our dyslexic children performed this task very slowly and with reduced accuracy but showed clear evidence of phonemic coding of the nonword items. Patterson and Marcel observed that their patients could not read out orthographically regular nonwords; our dyslexic children were able to do this task, although more slowly and somewhat less accurately than their chronological age or reading age controls. Finally, Patterson and Marcel observed that highly imageable words were more likely to be read correctly than words of equal frequency but low imageability; we observed a similar effect in both our dyslexic group and in their reading age controls. This implies that the imageability effect may not be peculiar to dyslexics but may be characteristic of normal reading under certain conditions. It is concluded that developmental dyslexics differ from the patients studied by Patterson and Marcel in demonstrating a pattern of reading which, though slow, is qualitatively similar to the reading of normal readers of a younger age. As such, our results do not support Jorms position.

Why learning to read is easier in Welsh than in English: Orthographic transparency effects evinced with frequency-matched tests

This study compared the rate of literacy acquisition in orthographically transparent Welsh and orthographically opaque English using reading tests that were equated for frequency of written exposure. Year 2 English-educated monolingual children were compared with Welsh-educated bilingual children, matched for reading instruction, background, locale, and math ability. Welsh children were able to read aloud accurately significantly more of their language (61% of tokens, 1821 types) than were English children (52% tokens, 716 types), allowing them to read aloud beyond their comprehension levels (168 vs. 116%, respectively). Various observations suggested that Welsh readers were more reliant on an alphabetic decoding strategy: word length determined 70% of reading latency in Welsh but only 22% in English, and Welsh reading errors tended to be nonword mispronunciations, whereas English children made more real word substitutions and null attempts. These findings demonstrate that the orthographic transparency of a language can have a profound effect on the rate of acquisition and style of reading adopted by its speakers.