Primary and secondary effects of processing instruction on Spanish clitic pronouns

Abstract

This study investigates the effects of token item frequency in Structured Input activities on both a primary target form (Spanish accusative clitics) and a secondary target form (Spanish dative clitics). Participants included 460 adult learners enrolled in a beginning-level Spanish language course and they were exposed to either 40, 60, 80, 100, 120, or 140 target form tokens. This study included a pretest, immediate posttest, and a delayed posttest measuring interpretation and production of both primary and secondary target forms. Findings reveal that primary form interpretation effects across all frequencies, however, production findings present themselves with the 60 and 80 token groups only. Secondary form interpretation findings reveal themselves across all frequency levels with the exception of the lowest frequency investigated (40 tokens) and secondary form production mirror those found in previous studies on the same forms. As such, we discuss the theoretical and methodological ramifications of these findings as well as directions for future research.

Sometimes Less Is More

“…White (2015) exposed six groups of participants to SI activities. Each group received either 40, 60, 80, 100, 120, or 140 items of third-person Spanish accusative clitics.…”

“…On the delayed posttest, the 140-item group outperformed the 100-item group (but not the other groups). Given the overall null effect of the number of training items across the two posttests, White (2015) concluded that any training size within the range of 40–140 items can positively impact participants’ interpretation of the target form (in this case, third-person Spanish accusative clitics) and the effects can be maintained after 3 weeks.…”

“…Because the 140-item group outperformed the 100-item group on the delayed posttest, but not the other groups with a lower number of items (i.e., 40, 60, and 80), White (2015) argues that the overall positive outcome of the interpretation task cannot be attributed to the number of training items. White reviews previous PI studies that investigated Spanish accusative clitics and remarks that both VanPatten and Oikkenon (1996), with 138 training items, and White and DeMil (2013), with 38 training items, made significant improvements on an interpretation task with mean scores similar to his own study.…”

Processing Instruction: A review of issues

“…Meanwhile, in other PI studies, the production tests only included sentence-completion tasks. These two types of measurements (gap-filling and sentence-completion) are, in fact, still prevalent in the studies on PI (e.g., Benati, 2015;Benati & Angelovska, 2015;White, 2015). Even if the researchers claimed to have applied discourse-based tests in assessing interpretation and production skills in their study, the discourse-based tests they employed, however, were very simple and not far different from a sentence-based test (e.g., Benati, 2015;Wong, 2015;VanPatten & Uludag, 2011).…”

A self-paced reading (SPR) study of the effects of processing instruction on the L2 processing of active and passive sentences

“…The research includes work on Spanish accusative case object pronouns (e.g. VanPatten & Cadierno, 1993; White, 2015), a French causative construction (e.g. VanPatten & Wong, 2004; Wong & Ito, 2017), German accusative/nominative case definite articles (e.g.…”