Evidence of learning following incidental exposure has been found for aspects of nonnative syntax in adults (Rebuschat & Williams, 2006, 2012; Williams & Kuribara, 2008). However, little research has tested delayed effects of learning under an incidental condition or moved beyond word order. This study investigated learning of third language (L3) morphosyntax (word order and case marking) under an incidental exposure condition. Participants were second language Spanish learners exposed auditorily to a semiartificial language, Japlish, during a semantic plausibility judgment task. Performance following exposure to L3 Japlish was assessed with acceptability judgment and picture-matching tasks that were administered immediately after exposure and 2 weeks later. Results on immediate tests showed a significant learning effect on acceptability judgment but none for picture matching. At delayed testing, results showed maintenance of the learning effect on acceptability judgment and significantly improved performance on picture matching. Results additionally showed that many of the learners arrived at the correct Japlish word-order rule; fewer did so for case marking. Follow-up analyses indicated that this rule knowledge, as measured by debriefing information, was important for performance on both assessment tasks, particularly at delayed testing. The results suggest that learning of L3 structures can take place following incidental exposure, that such learning is durable and undergoes improvement, and that development of reportable rule knowledge may also play an important role.

The current study examined how form-focused instruction (FFI) with and without corrective feedback (CF) as output enhancement facilitated second language (L2) perception of Mandarin tones at both the phonetic and phonological levels by 41 Cantonese learners of Mandarin. Two experimental groups, FFI only and FFI-CF, received a 90-min FFI treatment designed to encourage them to notice and practice the categorical distinctions of Mandarin tones through a range of communicative input and output activities. During these activities, the instructors provided CF only to students in the FFI-CF group by recasting and pushing them to repair their mispronunciations of the target features (i.e., output enhancement). The control group received comparable meaning-oriented instruction without any FFI. The effectiveness of FFI was assessed via a forced-choice identification task with both trained and untrained items for a variety of tonal contrasts in Mandarin (high-level Tone 1 vs. mid-rising Tone 2 vs. high-falling Tone 4). According to statistical comparisons, the FFI-only group attained significant improvement in all lexical and tonal contexts, and such effectiveness was evident particularly in the acquisition of Tone 1 and Tone 4—supposedly the most difficult instances due to their identical phonological status in the learners’ first language, Cantonese. The FFI-CF group, however, demonstrated marginally significant gains only under the trained lexical conditions. The results suggest that FFI promotes learners’ attentional shift from vocabulary to sound learning (generalizable gains in trained and untrained items) and facilitates their access to new phonetic and phonological categories. Yet the relative advantage of adding CF to FFI as output enhancement remains unclear, especially with respect to the less experienced L2 learners in the current study.

Participants learned foreign vocabulary by means of the paired-associates learning procedure in three conditions: (a) in silence, (b) with vocal music with lyrics in a familiar language playing in the background, or (c) with vocal music with lyrics in an unfamiliar language playing in the background. The vocabulary to learn varied in concreteness (concrete vs. abstract) and phonological typicality of the foreign words’ forms (typical vs. atypical). When tested during and immediately after training, learning outcomes were poorer in the familiar language music condition than in the unfamiliar language music and silence conditions, but this effect was short-lived, as shown in a delayed test 1 week after training, on which the effect was no longer found. Learning outcomes were better for concrete words than for abstract words and better for typical foreign forms than for atypical ones. Contrary to the adverse effects of familiar language music, the effects of concreteness and typicality were lasting. We explain the interference effect in the familiar language music condition in terms of the workings of the phonological loop, a component of working memory involved in vocabulary acquisition (e.g., Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990).

The current study addresses an aspect of second language (L2) phonological acquisition that has received little attention to date—namely, the acquisition of allophonic variation as a word boundary cue. The role of subphonemic variation in the segmentation of speech by native speakers has been indisputably demonstrated; however, the acquisition of allophonic cues in L2 phonology remains underexplored. We examine here L2 learners’ acquisition and perception of noncontrastive acoustic differentiation at word boundaries in English. Fifty French-speaking students of English were tested on their ability to differentiate potentially ambiguous phrases in which word boundaries are marked by the word-initial aspiration of plosives (e.g., Lou stops vs. loose tops) or prevocalic glottal stops (e.g., tea mat vs. team at). Participants showed greater sensitivity to the presence of glottal stops than aspiration, suggesting that glottal stops may represent a more perceptually salient segmentation cue for learners than aspiration. We discuss the implications of these results regarding the role of first language transfer versus the universality of some segmentation cues.

We report three experiments that explore the effect of prior linguistic knowledge on implicit language learning. Native speakers of English from the United Kingdom and native speakers of Cantonese from Hong Kong participated in experiments that involved different learning materials. In Experiment 1, both participant groups showed evidence of learning a mapping between articles and noun animacy. In Experiment 2, neither group showed learning of a mapping between articles and a linguistically anomalous concept (the number of capital letters in an English word or that of strokes in a Chinese character). In Experiment 3, the Chinese group, but not the English group, showed evidence of learning a mapping between articles and a concept derived from the Chinese classifier system. It was concluded that first language knowledge affected implicit language learning and that implicit learning, at least when natural language learning is concerned, is subject to constraints and biases.