Multiple routes to memory for a second language: Individual and situational factors

Project Information

MultiMemoryL2

Grant agreement ID: 101044631

DOI

10.3030/101044631

EC signature date 20 June 2022

Start date 1 November 2022

End date 31 October 2027

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 000 000,00

EU contribution

€ 2 000 000,00

Coordinated by

STICHTING RADBOUD UNIVERSITEIT
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MultiMemoryL2 (Multiple routes to memory for a second language: Individual and situational factors)

Reporting period: 2022-11-01 to 2025-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Learning a second language (L2) after early childhood is a challenge, and learners differ not only in how well they rise to this challenge, but presumably also in how they do it. For instance, a small minority of talented individuals is able to acquire a near-native accent in L2, despite the fact that the phonetic repertoire normally becomes dedicated to the native language within the first years of life. It seems thus plausible to assume that these learners have access to a different manner of phonetic learning. Different learning situations, e.g. learning a language in the classroom versus learning it by immersion, also seem likely to involve different acquisition mechanisms. However, we know almost nothing about such qualitative processing differences in L2 learning. Memory research, on the other hand, offers a number of dual-route or dual-system accounts that do describe different ways in which our brain stores and remembers information. The general dimension on which such routes differ is abstraction: New information may either be retained literally, or it could be abstracted to its most important features.
The current project aims to use such theories and methods from memory research to investigate the hypotheses that there are several alternative routes to L2 learning, and that individuals, as well as situations, differ with respect to which of these routes is preferably taken. Both word / pronunciation and grammar learning will be examined, assessing in how far language domains differ concerning the variability of learning routes. Furthermore, the stage of L2 acquisition may play an important role. Hence, both the learning of an entirely new language and the processing of an already established second language (English) are included. Since the research fields of second language acquisition (how we learn a new language) and of memory (how we learn something in general) have so far taken entirely different paths, the project will be the first of its kind.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In Work package 1 (The cognitive basis of ‘pronunciation supertalent’), a pilot study conducted with Dutch-English bilinguals developed and pre-tested some test instruments to be used in the large behavioral battery for Experiment 1.1 and offered some preliminary findings.
A large study with a group (N ~ 40) of likely exceptional pronunciation talents (‘super pronouncers’), recruited all over the Netherlands, as well as a large number of control participants is currently being conducted. This study contains 21 different tests concerning memory and auditory skills to look for difference between the groups, and understand better the cognitive basis of pronunciation talent.

In Work package 2 (Schema learning and ‘fast mapping’), we conducted three experiments on word learning in a new language (Exp. 1: Mandarin, Exp. 2: Italian, Exp. 3: Swedish) to explore how prior knowledge (or ‘schema’; in this case, overlap with Dutch as native language) impacts how these new words are learned. We also conducted a word recognition study with first and second language (L1 / L2) words including a measure of learning context. Remembering the context of leaning episode is assumed to be indicative of an episodic memory route. Also here, words of the first language can be seen as items one has higher prior knowledge about than words of the second language, and we aimed to see whether this changes which memory systems (episodic vs. declarative) are involved in learning.

In WP3 (Rule-based vs. similarity-based grammar processing), we conducted an experiment on learning words that follow an artificial grammar, and re-analyzed a large dataset on the initial stages of learning the grammar of a new language (Icelandic). The main achievement of this subproject so far is the exploration of a variety of sophisticated statistical modelling techniques to investigate the evidence regarding the existence of two distinct learner types using predominantly one of the two strategies. We continue to work however on specifying more clearly which evidence can be used to mark each of the two learning strategies.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The definite results we have obtained so far are still limited, but we have worked hard to solve problems of experimental methodology, participant recruitment (pronunciation supertalents), and theoretical conceptualization.
Among these results were, for WP1, that individuals with higher verbal working memory and, surprisingly, also those with more phonological false memories tend to have higher L2 pronunciation skill. We also got a clearer idea how to measure pronunciation skill, as well as all the memory and auditory skills that we are interested in.

In WP2, the results of the first three experiments show that only for very strongly predictive prior knowledge (Exp. 3, learning Swedish words that are highly similar to Dutch words), a different (less episodic) memory route seems to be used for learning than when no beneficial prior knowledge exists. In the word recognition study, we show (partially surprisingly) that remembering words encountered in a previous list is more reliable, more ‘episodic’ and more precise in a second compared to a first language. One tentative explanation for this is a heightened level of attention to words of a non-native language.

In WP3, we found evidence for both rule- and similarity-based learning of words that followed an underlying rule. However, we did not find statistical support for the existence of two distinct learner types using only one of the two strategies; rather, many learners employed a mix of both of them. Furthermore, learning strategy was not altered by the explicitness of the instructions regarding the underlying rules. In the second study, we explored how the shape of the learning function over time is potentially related to rule- vs. similarity-based learning, but all we can say at the moment is that learning functions do indeed differ vastly across individuals and also in a way that is supposed to reflect the two learning strategies, but it is difficult to validate this, because an established criterion for learning strategy is missing.