What word-level knowledge can adult learners acquire after minimal exposure to a new language?

Abstract

Discussions about the adult L2 learning capacity often take as their starting point stages where considerable L2 knowledge has already been accumulated. This paper probes the absolute earliest stages of learning and investigates what lexical knowledge adult learners can extract from complex, continuous speech in an unknown language after minimal exposure and without any help. Dutch participants were exposed to naturalistic but controlled audiovisual input in Mandarin Chinese, in which item frequency and gestural highlighting were manipulated. The results from a word recognition task showed that adults are able to draw on frequency to recognize disyllabic words appearing only eight times in continuous speech. The findings from a sound-to-picture matching task revealed that the mapping of meaning to word form requires a combination of cues: disyllabic words accompanied by a gesture were correctly assigned meaning after eight encounters. Overall, the study suggests that the adult learning mechanism is a considerably more powerful than typically assumed in the SLA literature drawing on frequency, gestural cues and syllable structure. Even in the absence of pre-existing knowledge about cognates and sound system to bootstrap and boost learning, it deals efficiently with very little, very complex input.

Exploring the potential relationship between eye gaze and English L2 speakers’ responses to recasts

“…Although joint attention is widely accepted as a crucial component of children's first language (L1) development, its role in adult second language (L2) learning remains underexplored. Recent studies have shown that gestures may facilitate the learning of L2 words (Gullberg et al, 2012;Kelly et al, 2009;Macedonia and Knösche, 2011) and new sound contrasts (Hirata and Kelly, 2010;Kelly and Lee, 2012), but the potential role of eye gaze in face-to-face L2 interaction has not been investigated. From Bruner's (Bruner, 1995) socio-pragmatic view of joint attention, which is compatible with both interactionist and emergentist approaches to L2 learning and use (e.g.…”

Investigating Native English Speakers’ Perception of Novel Arabic Phonemes after First Exposure

“…As mentioned earlier, many researchers such as Perdue (1996) Carroll, (2007Carroll, ( , 2012Carroll, ( , 2014, Gullberg et al (2010Gullberg et al ( , 2012, and Rast (2008Rast ( , 2010 amongst many others.…”

“…Therefore, different researchers have coined the term describing this area of research differently. For example, it was coined as 'ab initio' by Han and Liu (2013), 'minimal exposure' by Gullberg et al (2010Gullberg et al ( , 2012, and 'first exposure' by Rast (2010) and Carroll (2013Carroll ( , 2014. Throughout this paper, it will be referred to as first exposure of L2.…”

“…Numerous studies have also investigated first exposure through implicit learning, for example Han & Liu (2013), Gullberg et al (2010), Carroll (2012, 2014, and Carroll & Widjaja (2013). Overall, the major studies conducted in this area of inquiry of the initial stages of L2 acquisition are Gullberg et al (2010Gullberg et al ( , 2012 and Carroll (2012Carroll ( , 2014. The findings of these researchers make significant contributions to first exposure studies in SLA.…”

Production of Vowel /ə/ in Sundanese by Japanese Native Speakers in First Exposure

“…SLA researchers in the middle of many other scholars have organized L2 research examining the effect of an organized artificial and/or naturalistic input with adult L2 learners to analyze adult L2 learners' input processing abilities. Many studies have also studied first exposure through implicit learning, such as Gullberg, Roberts, andDimroth (2012), andCox (2019). They have examined L1 Dutch learners' first exposure to L2 Mandarin with a realistic input of a 14 minutes Mandarin weather report as the treatment.…”