Frost, R.,
Siegelman, N., Narkiss, A., & Afek, L. (2013). What predicts successful literacy
acquisition in a second language?. Psychological
science,24(7), 1243-1252. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3713085/
In the
previous post I wrote about the hypothesis according to which second language acquisition is like any other
learning process. In any
learning process we identify and perceive systematic and probabilistic
structures in our environment. Acquiring second ( and first) language is
mainly a process of acquiring and assimilating the statistical features of our
linguistic environment.
Israeli
researchers Frost,
Siegelman, Narkiss and Afek, studied this hypothesis
with American students at the overseas school of the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem. The students
took part in the research during their first year of learning Hebrew as a second
language.
Words in Hebrew are
normally composed by intertwining a tri-consonantal root, which carries the
core-meaning of the word, with word-pattern morphemes in which there are “open
slots” for the root’s consonants to fit into. The typical marker of
reading Hebrew is sensitivity to the location of root consonants. The writing system of Hebrew consists of letters
that mostly represent consonants (thereby root information), while most of the
vowels can optionally be superimposed on the consonants as diacritical marks
(“points”). These points, however, are omitted from most adult reading material.
Reading Hebrew fluently cannot be carried out by simply applying
grapheme-phoneme conversion rules, but requires a deep understanding of the
language.
Reading Hebrew was assessed at the beginning and at the end
of the school year by three tasks. The first monitored speed of decoding of
pointed nonwords and reflected the assimilation of the characteristics of the
Hebrew writing system. The second monitored accuracy in naming unpointed words,
reflecting the implicit learning of Hebrew phonological word patterns. The third -- cross-modal morphological priming --
directly tapped the main marker of reading in Hebrew: the assimilation of the
morphological root-based composition of words.
The
authors hypothesized that there will be individual differences in students' ability to assimilate the
structural features of Hebrew, and that these differences will be linked with
the students' general ability to acquire and assimilate the statistical
features of their environment.
In
order to study this hypothesis, the authored employed a visual statistical learning (VSL) task in which 24 relatively complex
visual shapes were
presented in a consecutive stream that lasted about ten minutes. The 24 shapes
were organized in eight triplets ("words"), which were presented in
the 10-minute stream in random order. Participants
were not told that the stream was constructed of "words". However,
following this phase, participants were presented with sets of 2
shape sequences : one was
a "word" that appeared
in the stream and the other was a "non-word" made of a sequence of
three shapes that were taken from the stream, but did not appear in that order.
Their success rate in distinguishing the "words" from the
"non-words" reflected their implicit learning of the structure of the
visual shapes within the stream.
The results showed that participants who scored well in the VSL task, that is, picked
up the implicit statistical structure embedded in the continuous stream of
visual shapes, on average, scored well on the tasks that monitored the
assimilation of the Semitic structure of Hebrew words! This suggests that a general non-linguistic faculty of
statistical learning accounts, at least to some extent, for success in second
language acquisition when the first and the second languages differ in their
basic statistical properties. Such an outcome also implies that a simple and
short test involving visual shapes could predict the speed of assimilating a
new linguistic environment, even before the first foreign word has been learnt.
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