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The Relative Contribution of Input Modification, Learner

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The Relative Contribution of Input Modification, Learner THE RELATIVE CONTRIBUTION OF INPUT MODIFICATION, LEARNER AWARENESS, AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES TO SECOND LANGUAGE CONSTRUCTION LEARNING A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN SECOND LANGUAGE STUDIES MAY 2014 By Daniel O. Jackson Dissertation Committee: Richard Schmidt, Chairperson John M. Norris Luca Onnis Lourdes Ortega Peter Robinson Amy J. Schafer Keywords: Input, awareness, individual differences, second language learning, working memory, personality ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I experienced a rare and ephemeral kind of happiness upon completing the final paragraph of this dissertation, which at times during the writing felt more like a raging confluence than a clear synthesis of ideas. Although the sensation of joyfulness that trickled into my consciousness then was utterly private, there were many special people behind it. I owe my satisfaction, as well as the present accomplishment, to them. I am especially grateful to the members of my dissertation committee, whose expertise in second language acquisition and commitment to their students are remarkable. My chair, Dick Schmidt, has been a truly fantastic mentor, whose penetrating insight and enthusiasm for new ideas, I hope, are reflected in this dissertation. I am deeply thankful for his guidance. I was also extremely fortunate to have Peter Robinson join my committee. This dissertation is infused with Peter’s ideas on SLA, culled from his profound writing or from beachside conversations he generously found time for. As expected, Lourdes Ortega has been a wonderful teacher and an unrivalled inspiration, whose keen advice on academic writing I will always remember. I also greatly benefitted from John Norris’ coaching toward more transparent and meaningful quantitative reasoning. Luca Onnis helped substantially, from building the lab that provided a context for this study to offering thoughtful comments along the way. Luca, along with Amy Schafer, encouraged and supported the use of R software. I am further indebted to Amy for her outstanding service as university representative on the committee. A special word of thanks is due to Min Young Cho, who assisted in coding data for this research. I must also thank those who developed and allowed the use of measures i adopted in this study, including the Big Five Aspect Scales and the Automated Reading Span task. Many other scholars, as well, deserve recognition for their support. Professors Shuqiang Zhang, William O’Grady, and J. D. Brown lent me deep insights through their courses at UHM. I am also grateful to those who organized and attended related talks I gave at SLRF 2012 and CALICO 2013. Additionally, I gained a profound appreciation of Dick’s contribution while working with the editors of Noticing and second language acquisition: Studies in honor of Richard Schmidt. Thanks Jim, Joara, and Sylvia! The writing of this dissertation was supported by financial assistance from the Bilinski Dissertation Fellowship Fund and the Language Learning Dissertation Grant Program, for which I am grateful. Furthermore, I would like to thank the Linguistics Beyond the Classroom Program for assisting with participant recruitment, as well as the staff and volunteers in the Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism Laboratory for enabling access to valuable resources. I also want to thank Emily Lee in the SLS Department, and the Center for Language and Technology staff, for clerical and technical help leading up to my dissertation defense meeting. Many individuals provided moral support while I was working toward my doctoral degree and my sincere gratitude goes to them. I thank my fellow graduate students in the SLS Department, along with the editorial staff at Language Learning & Technology, and various program staff at UHM, for advice and encouragement. Lastly, I offer my greatest thanks to my family for their love and support. My parents, Dan and Lorraine, and my sister, Cara, have provided ongoing encouragement. Above all, Misa has been a constant source of happiness, from the beginning of this journey to its completion…arigatou gozaimashita. ii ABSTRACT This study adopts a constructionist approach to investigating three recent proposals grounded in cognitive perspectives on second language acquisition, which broaden the research agenda in the areas of input modification, learner awareness, and individual differences. Specifically, it was hypothesized that the following would support learning of artificial morphological constructions: (a) input modification in the form of partially repeated sequences, (b) awareness of precise form-meaning mappings, and (c) cognitive- affective learner differences. During the computerized training phase of the study, 90 English-dominant undergraduate participants were placed into three conditions: two experimental conditions exhibiting partial repetition similar to that found in caregiver discourse and a control condition exhibiting no such repetition. The testing phase utilized a picture-word matching task to assess participants’ ability to judge correct versus incorrect constructions based on trained and untrained subtest items. Learner awareness was gauged through source attributions and a retrospective written questionnaire. Measures of learner differences included working memory tasks (reading span and dual 3-back) and personality scales (openness and intellect). A test-retest study with 20 of the participants showed these individual difference measures to be relatively stable. Results indicated that the study’s hypotheses were largely supported. Learner awareness levels, reading span scores, and item type significantly predicted outcomes on the trained and untrained subtests of the picture-word matching task, based on a regression model including the random effects of items and participants. Also, a better fit to the data was achieved by using a fine-grained, rather than course-grained, system of coding awareness. iii However, contrary to hypothesis, participants in the experimental conditions did not significantly outperform those in the control condition on the picture-word matching task. Another finding of this study was that participants reported use of both explicit (rule, memory) and implicit (guess, intuition) knowledge sources on the picture-word matching task. In conclusion, this study offers additional evidence concerning the roles of awareness and individual differences in second language learning, suggests ways to enhance the internal validity of research in this domain, and potentially informs future research on input modification as a pedagogic technique. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................. i Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iii List of Tables .................................................................................................................... xii List of Figures .................................................................................................................. xiii Chapter 1: Introduction ....................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Cognitive perspectives on second language acquisition ............................................ 1 1.2 Recent proposals concerning input, awareness, and ability ....................................... 1 1.3 Research aims ............................................................................................................. 4 1.4 Scope and potential contribution ................................................................................ 6 1.5 The organization of this dissertation .......................................................................... 7 Chapter 2: A rationale for variation sets in L2 learning ................................................... 10 2.1 Introduction .............................................................................................................. 10 2.2 Background to three experientialist approaches to input in SLA ............................. 11 2.2.1 Interactionist approaches ................................................................................. 12 2.2.2 Cognitive linguistic approaches ...................................................................... 16 2.2.3 Approaches based on general learning principles ........................................... 19 2.3 Variation sets ............................................................................................................ 21 2.3.1 Definition and overview .................................................................................. 21 2.3.2 Additional distinctions and measurement ....................................................... 24 2.3.3 Research findings ............................................................................................ 26 2.3.3.1 Longitudinal studies ............................................................................ 27 v 2.3.3.2 Experimental investigations ................................................................ 28 2.3.3.3 Corpus analyses .................................................................................. 31 2.3.4 Summary of variation sets ..............................................................................
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