Implicit Learning And Its Superiority In Acquisition Of Semantic Preference Of Second Language

The term implicit learning,coined by Reber(1967),refers to the phenomenon that people acquire complex,rule-governed knowledge without intention to learn and without awareness about what has been learned.There is a growing commitment to the idea that implicit learning underlies language acquisition.To date,most of the studies carried out in this field have addressed the implicit learning of phonology,word order,or inflectional morphology,which have concerned learning at the level of form.There were also a large number of studies in this field have addressed the implicit learning of form-meaning mappings,semantic prosody,or semantic preference,which have concerned learning at the level of semantic.It is of our interest to investigate the implicit learning of semantic preference.Semantic preference is a typical kind of collocative meaning,which is the tendency of a word to co-occur with words have similar semantic features(Paciorek & Williams,2015 a,2015b).The main question that motivated the current study was whether Chinese English learners can acquire the English words' semantic preference implicitly?Furthermore,the current study would examine whether implicit learning had its superiority over explicit learning when participants were learning L2 words' semantic preference? We believe that such investigations,apart from providing strong evidence for the implicit learning of L2 collocations and shed light on the powerful implicit learning mechanisms of L2 vocabulary acquisition,can also providing evidence for the effective teaching of L2 vocabulary.To address the above questions,the present study conducted three experiments.One-factor Between-group design was conducted in Experiment 1,andthe group(experimental group/trained control group)was defined as independent variable.The aim of this experiment was to investigate whether Chinese learners can implicitly acquire the novel English verbs' collocative meanings(semantic preferences in this case)under incidental learning conditions.One-factor Between-group design was conducted in Experiment 2,and the group(incidental learning group/intentional learning group)was defined as independent variable.The aim of this experiment was to investigate whether implicit learning had its superiority over explicit learning when participants were learning L2 words' semantic preference.Previous studies regarded incidental learning as implicit learning while regarded intentional learning as explicit learning,that is,only the consciousness of the learning process was considered to distinguish between implicit learning and explicit learning.Based on the definition of implicit learning,it's important to highlight two aspects of this definition.On one hand,the learning process is unconscious(i.e.,incidental learning).On the other hand,the products of learning(i.e.,implicit knowledge)is unconscious.And the present study would distinguish between implicit and explicit learning by considering both the consciousness of the learning process and the products of learning.One-factor Between-group design was conducted in Experiment3,and the group(incidental learning group/intentional learning group)was defined as independent variable.The aim of this experiment was to investigate whether implicit learning had its superiority over explicit learning when participants were learning L2words' semantic preference in the case of complex rules.The main results were as follows:(1)The results of experiment 1 showed that Chinese learners can implicitly acquire the novel English verbs' semantic preferences.Specifically,the experimental group performed significantly above chance and trained control group,indicating that the participants in the experimental group acquired semantic preference of novel English words.The results of verbal reports and source attributions indicated that participants acquired implicit knowledge of semantic preference.(2)The results of experiment 2 showed that explicit learning had itssuperiority over implicit learning when Chinese learners learning L2 words' semantic preference.Specifically,if both the consciousness of the learning process and the products of learning were considered,the aware participants in the intentional group(explicit learning)significantly outperformed the unaware participants in the incidental group(implicit learning),and the accuracy of the intentional group based on explicit structural knowledge(explicit learning)was significantly higher than the accuracy of the incidental group based on implicit structural knowledge(implicit learning).(3)The results of experiment 3 showed that explicit learning had its superiority over implicit learning when Chinese learners learning L2 words' semantic preference in the case of complex rules.Specifically,if both the consciousness of the learning process and the products of learning were considered,the aware participants in the intentional group(explicit learning)significantly outperformed the unaware participants in the incidental group(implicit learning),and the accuracy of the intentional group based on explicit structural knowledge(explicit learning)was significantly higher than the accuracy of the incidental group based on implicit structural knowledge(implicit learning).The mainly conclusions were as follows:(1)Chinese learners can implicitly acquire the novel English verbs' semantic preferences.(2)If both the consciousness of the learning process and the products of learning were considered,explicit learning had its superiority over implicit learning when Chinese learners learning L2 semantic preference,that is,there was no implicit learning superiority.