The Optimal Distribution of Practice for the Acquisition of L2 Morphology: A Conceptual Replication and Extension
This study was supported by Grant‐in‐Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). I am grateful to my research assistants, Naoko Miyauchi, Yuki Aizawa, Misaki Kuratsubo, Yuka Oishi, Baikuntha Bhatta, and Aya Mizuno for their assistance in data collection and coding. I would like to express my gratitude to Professors Maki Yamane, Mayuko Okawa, Kimie Oshima, and Noriko Iwamoto for their cooperation in participant recruitment. I thank Associate Editor Emma Marsden and the anonymous reviewers for providing insightful and constructive feedback.
Abstract
This study examined optimal learning schedules for second language (L2) acquisition of a morphological structure. Sixty participants studied the simple and complex morphological rules of a novel miniature language system so as to use them for oral production. They engaged in four training sessions in either shorter spaced (3.3‐day interval) or longer spaced (7‐day interval) learning conditions. From the beginning of the third training session, the 3.3‐day interval group started to provide more accurate target rules than the 7‐day interval group. This superior performance by the 3.3‐day interval group was maintained on both 7‐ and 28‐day delayed posttests with small to medium effect sizes. No significant difference was found between the two groups for utterance speed, nor did linguistic complexity exert an influence on the effectiveness of different distributions of learning conditions.
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Number of times cited: 4
- Bimali Indrarathne, Michael Ratajczak and Judit Kormos, Modelling Changes in the Cognitive Processing of Grammar in Implicit and Explicit Learning Conditions: Insights From an Eye‐Tracking Study, Language Learning, 68, 3, (669-708), (2018).
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- John Rogers and Anisa Cheung, Input spacing and the learning of L2 vocabulary in a classroom context, Language Teaching Research, 10.1177/1362168818805251, (136216881880525), (2018).
