Very high-level, functional ability in foreign languages is increasingly important in many walks of life -- from business and science to diplomacy and national security. It is also very rare, and an early start and/or a special talent, or aptitude, for languages is believed to be necessary. Language aptitude is defined as a combination of cognitive/perceptual abilities measurable on a standardized test and advantageous in second language (L2) acquisition. Language aptitude has been related to variation in ultimate attainment (i.e., long-term differences in acquisition) in both classroom and immersion settings. This research will investigate the extent to which aptitude for explicit language learning, defined as "language analytic ability," and implicit language learning, defined as "sequence learning ability," are differentially important, as measured by performance on tasks that involve either controlled or automatic use of L2 knowledge.
There will be three groups of subjects: a control group of Spanish native speakers, and two groups of Chinese immigrants, long-term residents of Spain, who learned Spanish (a typologically very different L2) naturalistically, and whose first sustained exposure was either as children (ages 3 and 6) or adults (after 15).
Previous studies have relied on single measures of aptitude, weighted heavily in favor of cognitive abilities that allow for explicit learning (thought to be the primary adult learning process, as opposed to implicit learning by children), and single measures of attainment that favored controlled use of L2 knowledge. To correct for this, a metalinguistic knowledge test and a word-monitoring task, as well as four grammaticality judgment tests, will be used to assess the Chinese learners' Spanish under different conditions of time pressure (pressured/unpressured) and modality (visual/auditory). The results will help clarify the relative importance of starting age and type of language aptitude (explicit or implicit) for learners who need to achieve advanced L2 proficiency.
This project produced two major types of findings: cognitive and linguistic. Regarding cognitive findings, the project provided evidence of two main types of aptitude for language learning, labeled as Explicit Language Aptitude (ELA) and Implicit Language Aptitude (ILA) (Granena, 2013a). ELA was hypothesized to be relevant for explicit learning and processing, understood as learning that takes place intentionally through reasoning, deliberate hypothesis testing, and memorization. ILA was hypothesized to be relevant for implicit learning and processing, understood as learning from input in the absence of conscious intention to learn, conscious awareness of the fact that we are learning, and conscious attribution of any noticed change to the effects of learning. These two types of aptitudes played a differential role in the second language attainment of Chinese-Spanish bilingual speakers. ILA was related to attainment in formal, non-salient structures involving grammatical agreement in Spanish (gender, person and number agreement), but not in more salient structures involving meaning (passives, subjunctive, aspect). This suggested a differential role of aptitude depending on the type of language structure. Interestingly, the effects of aptitude were present in both early bilinguals who started learning the second language between ages 3 and 6, and late bilinguals who started learning the second language after age 16, but not in the native-speaker control group. This indicates that cognitive factors start compensating for age effects in second language learning as early as age 3. Regarding linguistic findings, the most relevant results were the significant differences in second language attainment between early bilinguals and native speakers, indicating that maturational (age) constraints have an effect on the acquisition of the second language morphosyntax as early as age 3. In addition, there were similarities between early and late bilinguals regarding the acquisition of grammatical agreement. While early bilinguals performed significantly worse than native speakers, they did not differ from late bilinguals. This suggests similarities in child and adult second language acquisition in the area of formal features (at least for speakers of a first language that lacks grammatical agreement, Chinese). The intellectual merit of these results lays on their potential to transform the current understanding of language aptitude in the second language acquisition field. The work critically reexamined the most commonly accepted conceptualizations of aptitude in the literature, pointing out their bias towards explicit and attention-driven memory processes and the impact this probably had on the positive associations typically reported between aptitude and learning as measured by tests that focus on linguistic structure and correctness. The work further explored a reconceptualization of aptitude for second language acquisition based on calls for new aptitude constructs made in the field of educational psychology. This was done by integrating aptitude measures already used within the field and innovative online measures from cognitive psychology that could be used as measures of implicit learning. Given the increasing interest in many societies in producing learners with very high (professionally adequate) levels of second language proficiency, the results of this project are of practical interest to education, business, and government professionals alike. They inform about the aptitudes that are necessary for language learners to reach a high level of second language attainment and can, therefore, help improve the efficiency of language training in business and government (by recruiting and placing personnel according to their aptitudes or identifying individuals who are at risk and require intervention). Finally, the results of this project can make language instruction more efficient than currently is the case by matching learners’ aptitudinal strengths to optimal instructional practices (e.g., type of teaching method and corrective feedback).
