Salience in Second Language Acquisition: Physical Form, Learner Attention, and Instructional Focus

Area of Science:

• Second Language Acquisition
• Cognitive Psychology
• Linguistic Psychology

Background:

• Learners often prioritize physically salient cues over less obvious ones, like morphosyntax.
• Prior linguistic experience can create 'learned attention,' blocking new information.
• Form-focused instruction (FFI) aims to improve attention to crucial linguistic features.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate how physical salience, prior experience, and FFI impact adult L2 learners' attention to morphological cues.
• Examine attentional processes in L2 acquisition, specifically how FFI overcomes cue salience and learned blocking.
• Determine the role of input modality (aural vs. visual) in L2 morphological processing and FFI effectiveness.

Main Methods:

• Experiment 1: Eye-tracking of Chinese native speakers learning Latin, comparing control conditions (CCs) with three FFI types (verb grammar instruction, verb salience, verb pretraining).
• Experiment 2: Investigated L1 English learners' attention to morphological cues with aural vs. visual input and different FFI manipulations.
• Assessed cue utilization via comprehension tests and eye-tracking data to analyze attentional focus and processing.

Main Results:

• In Experiment 1, learners initially favored adverbs over verb morphology, but FFI increased sensitivity to verb morphology.
• FFI effectively enhanced attention to verb-tense morphology in both experiments.
• Input modality affected processing: visual input was generally easier, and FFI effectiveness varied across modalities (e.g., verb salience effective visually, not aurally).

Conclusions:

• Learners' attention is shaped by prior experience and cue salience.
• FFI is crucial for overcoming attention biases and learned blocking in L2 acquisition.
• Optimizing FFI requires considering input modality and specific instructional techniques to enhance morphological cue processing.