Saturday, February 21, 2015

What predicts success in second language acquisition? Or: babies know statistics! Part B.


 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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