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Project
Eye-Catching - Investigating the link between salience, attention and awareness in the acquisition of grammatical morphology in a second language. (FWOAL993)
The cognitive mechanisms of attention and awareness are believed
to play a crucial role in the process of second language acquisition
(SLA) but little is known about their exact nature and role. Many
factors have been proposed to affect a learner’s attention to and
awareness of new linguistic forms in a second language (L2), some
of which pertain to the learner or learning context, while others are
inherent to the forms themselves. The latter determine a form’s
salience. Researchers believe that the salience of a linguistic form in
an L2 critically determines its learning difficulty but little research has
investigated this directly or systematically. The present project aims
to do just that, by analyzing the eye movements of L2 learners when
they encounter new grammatical forms (articles, suffixes) of different
types and degrees of saliency while reading texts in a semi- artificial
language called Englishti. These eye movement reveal how the
salience of the form interacts with the attention that learners allocate
to it. A questionnaire probes into the level of awareness that learners
have of the new forms and their meaning while reading. Through a
series of 5 experiments that together consider both discrete and
interactional effects of various types of salience in combination with
learner- and context-specific variables, we expect to develop a more
robust understanding of the nature and role of salience in SLA and
how this can be applied to real-world language learning.
to play a crucial role in the process of second language acquisition
(SLA) but little is known about their exact nature and role. Many
factors have been proposed to affect a learner’s attention to and
awareness of new linguistic forms in a second language (L2), some
of which pertain to the learner or learning context, while others are
inherent to the forms themselves. The latter determine a form’s
salience. Researchers believe that the salience of a linguistic form in
an L2 critically determines its learning difficulty but little research has
investigated this directly or systematically. The present project aims
to do just that, by analyzing the eye movements of L2 learners when
they encounter new grammatical forms (articles, suffixes) of different
types and degrees of saliency while reading texts in a semi- artificial
language called Englishti. These eye movement reveal how the
salience of the form interacts with the attention that learners allocate
to it. A questionnaire probes into the level of awareness that learners
have of the new forms and their meaning while reading. Through a
series of 5 experiments that together consider both discrete and
interactional effects of various types of salience in combination with
learner- and context-specific variables, we expect to develop a more
robust understanding of the nature and role of salience in SLA and
how this can be applied to real-world language learning.
Date:1 Jan 2021 → Today
Keywords:Second language acquisition, salience, attention, awareness
Disciplines:Language acquisition, Morphology, Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics