CRAL Seminar - Implicit learning and SLA

Dr John Williams, University of Cambridge, is giving the CRAL seminar in the School of English Studies

"Experimental investigations into learning form-meaning connections and word order regularities.
Research on implicit learning, and “statistical” learning more generally, has revealed the human ability to unconsciously track the probabilities of environmental events, lending support to Emergentist approaches to language acquisition. I shall describe studies that demonstrate implicit learning of word order patterns and form-meaning connections. However, I shall also argue that implicit learning is constrained. First, our research suggests that not all form-meaning associations are equally learnable, and this may reflect linguistic constraints. Second, we have not obtained any evidence of implicit, or even incidental, learning of abstract syntactic rules, as required to support generalisations. I shall discuss whether limitations on implicit learning necessarily mean that we must appeal to additional learning mechanisms in order to explain adult SLA. "