*Part of the 2012 Second Language Research Forum "Building Bridges Between Disciplines: SLA in Many Contexts"

Aptitude in adult SLA is claimed to correlate with learning, although the strength of correlation varies considerably (e.g., Skehan, 2012). One of the most studied and used components of aptitude is grammatical sensitivity (as measured by the MLAT). Grammatical sensitivity is assumed to measure an individual’s ability to see relationships among words, which in turn presumably underlies “grammar learning.” In a variety of empirical studies on classroom learners, grammatical sensitivity is indeed shown to correlate with rule learning (e.g., de Graff, 1998; Robinson, 1995; see also Sawyer & Ranta, 2001). But what if language learning is not characterized as rule learning? What if learning is characterized as the interaction of input with internal mechanisms (e.g., Universal Grammar), mediated by processing? In the present talk, I report the results of four studies in Spanish, Russian, French, and German in which we examined learners experiencing processing instruction with canonical and non-canonical word orders as these intersected with the First-noun Strategy. We used two measures (trials to criterion and posttest results). Unlike other research, we found no correlations between grammatical sensitivity and the two measures for any language for any structures. I will discuss these results in terms of how both language and language acquisition are conceptualized more generally in the literature on instructed SLA.

Bill VanPatten is Professor of Spanish and Second Language Studies as well as Director of Romance Language Instruction at Michigan State University. He has published extensively in the fields of second language acquisition and second language instruction. His research interests include second language input processing/sentence processing, the relationship between syntax and morphology, and instructed SLA.