In this article, we examine whether the effectiveness of processing instruction (PI) is limited to forms targeted in the instructional treatment (primary effects) or whether it also extends to other forms (transfer-of-training effects). L2 Spanish learners (N = 123) received either PI or traditional instruction (TI) targeting third-person accusative clitic pronouns, and a third group received no instruction. We used a pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed posttest design to examine the impact of instruction type on learners’ interpretation and production of accusative clitic pronouns; we used the same design to analyze the impact of instruction type on their interpretation and production of a second form, dative clitics, for which learners did not receive instruction (secondary effects). Although both PI and TI improved on the learners’ interpretation of dative clitics in object-verb-subject (OVS) sentences, TI showed a decrease in accuracy with subject-verb-object (SVO) sentences. We propose that of the two approaches, only PI is effective in prompting learners to alter the way they process primary linguistic data in the input.
This study compares the effects of processing instruction (PI), structured input (SI), and form-related explicit information (FREI) on a primary target form (i.e., third-person Spanish accusative clitics) and on a secondary form (i.e., third-person Spanish dative clitics). Participants included 151 adult learners enrolled in a beginning-level Spanish course. Findings revealed that SI is as effective on the primary target form as PI immediately after treatment; however, the FREI component of PI may play a positive role at the delayed posttest, as exhibited by the fact that the PI group maintained gains, whereas the SI group, although improved from the pretest, did not. Learners exposed to both PI and SI also demonstrated gains on the secondary target form, which suggests a transfer-of-training effect for both interventions. As such, we discuss the theoretical and methodological ramifications of these findings.
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