Two experiments examined the learning of form-meaning connections under conditions where the relevant forms were noticed but the critical aspects of meaning were not. Miniature noun class systems were employed, and the participants were told that the choice of determiner in noun phrases depended on whether the object was "near" or "far" from the subject of the sentence. What they were not told was that the choice of determiner also depended on the animacy of the noun. Most participants remained unaware of this correlation during the training and test tasks; yet when faced with a choice between two determiners for a noun, they chose the one that was appropriate to the noun's animacy at significantly above-chance levels, even though that combination had never been encountered during training. This ability to generalize provided evidence of learning form-meaning connections without awareness. In both experiments, there was a correlation between generalization test performance and knowledge of languages that encode grammatical gender. This points to the importance of prior knowledge in implicit learning. Implicit learning occurs without intention to learn and without awareness of what has been learned+ It is clearly of great educational importance to know what can and cannot be learned in this way and what factors might make some individuals more successful implicit learners than others+ At a theoretical level, the study of implicit learning can help us come to understand the nature of unconscious learning mechanisms, their relationship to other cognitive constructs such as memory and attention, and their interactions with existing Many thanks to Ronald Leow, Daphnée Simard, and the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article+

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Language development is frequently characterized as a process where learning proceeds implicitly, that is, incidentally and in absence of awareness of what was learned. This article reports the results of two experiments that investigated whether second language acquisition can also result in implicit knowledge. Adult learners were trained on an artificial language under incidental learning conditions and then tested by means of grammaticality judgments and subjective measures of awareness. The results indicate that incidental exposure to second language syntax can result in unconscious knowledge, which suggests that at least some of the learning in this experiment was implicit. At the same time, however, it was also found that conscious (but unverbalizable) knowledge was clearly linked to improved performance in the grammaticality judgment task.

Although there is good evidence for implicit learning of associations between forms, little work has investigated implicit learning of form‐meaning connections, and the findings are somewhat contradictory. Two experiments were carried out using a novel reaction time methodology to investigate implicit learning of grammatical form‐meaning connections. Participants learned four novel articles but were not told about a critical semantic factor that determines agreement with the accompanying noun. Their task was to indicate as quickly as possible which of two pictures was being referred to by an article‐noun combination. The measure of learning was whether response times would slow down when the agreement rule was violated (i.e., when the wrong article was used for the picture being referred to). Experiment 1 revealed such an effect when articles correlated with noun animacy, even for participants with no reported awareness of this regularity. In Experiment 2 no such effect was obtained when the regularity concerned the relative size of two objects. It is concluded that grammatical form‐meaning connections may be learned implicitly, but learning is constrained by the nature of the meaning involved. It is argued that concepts are differentially available to implicit language learning processes.

The two experiments reported here investigated the processing of English wh- questions by native speakers of English and advanced Chinese, German, and Korean learners of English as a second language. Performance was evaluated in relation to parsing strategies and sensitivity to plausibility constraints. In an on-line plausibility judgment task, both native and non-native speakers behaved in similar ways. All groups postulated a gap at the first position consistent with the grammar, as predicted by the filler-driven strategy and as shown by garden path or filled-gap effects that were induced when the hypothesized gap location turned out to be incorrect. In addition, all subjects interpreted the plausibility of the filler-gap dependency, as shown by a reduction in the garden path effect when the initial analysis was implausible. However, the native speakers' reading profiles showed evidence of a more immediate effect of plausibility than those of the non-native speakers, suggesting that they initiated reanalysis earlier when the first analysis was implausible. Experiment 2 showed that the non-native speakers had difficulty canceling a plausible gap hypothesis even in an off-line (pencil and paper) task, whereas for the native speakers there was no evidence that the sentences caused difficulty in this situation. The results suggest that native and non-native speakers employ similar strategies in immediate on-line processing and hence are garden-pathed in similar ways, but they differ in their ability to recover from misanalysis.

The traditional implicit learning literature has focused primarily on the abstraction of statistical regularities in form-form connections. More attention has been recently directed toward the implicit learning of form-meaning connections, which might be crucial in the acquisition of natural languages. The current article reports evidence for implicit learning of a mapping between a novel set of determiners and thematic roles, obtained using a newly developed reaction time methodology. The results conclude that contextually derived form-meaning connections might be implicitly learned.

Two experiments examined the effect of single-modality (sound or text) and bimodal (sound and text) presentation on word learning, as measured by both improvements in spoken word recognition efficiency (long lag repetition priming) and recognition memory. Native and advanced nonnative speakers of English were tested. In Experiment 1 auditory lexical decisions on familiar words were equally primed by prior bimodal and sound-only presentation, whereas there were no priming effects for nonwords. Experiment 2 employed a rhyme judgment task using nonwords. Repetition priming of auditory rhyme judgment decisions was now obtained, and this was greater in the bimodal than the sound-only condition. In both experiments prior bimodal presentation improved recognition memory for spoken words and nonwords compared to single modality presentation. We conclude that simultaneous text presentation can aid novel word learning under certain conditions, as assessed by both explicit and implicit memory tests.It has been proposed that one way of helping learners of English to comprehend authentic video programs while maintaining a target language learning environment is adding English text subtitles to English videos (Vanderplank, 1988). Identical in format to standard translation subtitles found in many foreign films (e.g., French subtitles for an English film), same-language subtitles (e.g., English subtitles for an English soundtrack), also known as unilingual or intralingual subtitles (Jung, 1990), can be presented at the bottom of a video screen synchronously with a video soundtrack. Current technology, such as subtitling for those with hearing impairments (see Vanderplank, 1988, for a discussion) and recent language-learning multimedia packages (e.g., "Italia 2000", Burnage, 1997) now present learners and teachers with the option of using videos that  2002 Cambridge University Press 0142-7164/02 $9.50

The degree to which native and non-native readers interpret English sentences incrementally was investigated by examining plausibility effects on reanalysis processes. Experiment 1 required participants to read sentences word by word and to make on-line plausibility judgements. The results showed that natives and non-natives immediately computed the plausibility of the preferred structural analysis, which then affected ease of reanalysis. Experiment 2 required participants to read the same sentences word by word in order to perform a memory task. The natives showed a similar pattern of results to Experiment 1, whereas for the non-natives plausibility effects were delayed. However, the non-natives still appeared to be performing immediate syntactic reanalysis. It is concluded that syntactic processing was person- and task-independent, whereas the incrementality of interpretation was more dependent on task demands for the non-natives than for the natives.