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IMPLICIT LEARNING OF LATIN STRESS REGULARITIES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2016

Calbert R. Graham  and
John N. Williams
Calbert R. Graham*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge, UK
John N. Williams
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge, UK
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dr. Calbert R. Graham, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge, English Faculty Building, 9 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DP, UK. E-mail: crg29@cam.ac.uk
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Abstract

This study examines whether Japanese native (L1) listeners can implicitly learn stress pattern regularities, not present in their L1, after a brief auditory exposure. In the exposure phase, the participants listened to and repeated words bearing stress patterned after Latin, but with a highly restricted consonant inventory. They performed a judgment task designed to test whether they had learned the relevant stress pattern regularities from the brief listening experience. We assessed participants’ awareness of the inherent stress regularities by analyzing confidence in making decisions and by verbal report. Results suggest that although participants remained unaware of the underlying stress regularities they performed significantly above chance in endorsing correctly stressed novel items even when they claimed to be guessing. In addition, there was no difference in confidence between correct and incorrect judgments. These results suggest that brief exposure resulted in implicit knowledge of abstract stress assignment rules. However, participants rejected correctly stressed words that contained consonants that were not present in the test phase. On the basis of this finding, we speculate that in the acquisition of second language phonology, a violation at the segmental level may be deemed more costly than a violation in the prosodic domain.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 3 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

We would like to thank Brechtje Post and Meg Zellers for their feedback on the design of this study. We are also grateful to Bill VanPatten and the anonymous reviewers for extensive comments on previous drafts of this manuscript. The first author gratefully acknowledges research funding for this project from the St. John’s College (University of Cambridge) Research Scholars’ Support Fund.

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