Implicit Learning

This study focused on the pedagogical application of priming in an EFL context. Structural priming refers to the speakers’ tendency to produce the structure they encountered in recent discourse in subsequent production compared to an alternative form. Given the limited number of studies in the literature with a focus on the application of priming in L2 teaching and the problems that L2 learners face during speech production, the present study aimed at investigating whether the implication of priming leads to a more frequent oral and written production of the relative clause (RC) structure compared to adjectival modification of nouns (AN) in long- and short-terms as an instance of implicit learning. Participants consisted of 60 EFL female L2 learners, aged between 18-25 years old. Two experimental and 1 control groups were defined and 20 participants were allocated to each group. By applying a pretest, a treatment, an immediate posttest, a delayed posttest design, a picture description task, and a grammaticality judgment test (GJT), the data were gathered. Results of the descriptive and inferential analyses revealed that the implication of priming led to an improvement in the rate of the RC construction when the participants were involved in the written production of the L2, as compared to oral modality. Results are discussed based on structural complexity and procedures involved in L2 production. Theoretical and practical implications of the study are considered, too.

While second language acquisition can be a complex and time-consuming process, developing efficient approaches that are less demanding on the part of the learner can greatly enhance the learning outcomes. The present study was an attempt to explore the potential application of priming as an approach to enhance the production of motion phrasal verbs. Ninety students were divided into intermediate and upper-intermediate groups based on their proficiency levels. The participants were required to narrate a silent movie as a baseline written production task. In the next stage, for the purpose of priming, they were required to read a storybook containing instances of motion events expressed in phrasal verbs. Immediately afterward, the participants were asked to narrate a second silent movie. The researchers also administered a working memory test to investigate its potential impact on the learning outcomes. The results indicated that only the upper-intermediate group benefited from the priming mechanism. Additionally, the results suggested that working memory did not show a significant predictive role in implicit learning within the specific context of motion phrasal verbs. These findings are in line with the processability hypothesis, which posits that developmental readiness plays a significant role in language learning.

Background: In recent years, the examination of the impact of various types of different exercises as the key influential components on balance has gained considerable popularity. Numerous studies have investigated the effects of diverse exercise modalities on the enhancement of balance abilities. Aim: The aim of this research was to compare the effects of different types of learning (explicit and implicit) on the balance of elderly individuals. Materials and Methods: Forty-two elderly participants (both women and men), after initial health assessments and medical history reviews, voluntarily participated in the study. They were randomly assigned to three groups: explicit learning group (14 participants), implicit learning group (14 participants), and control group (14 participants). Before the implementation of the targeted learning exercises, the static balance of the participants was assessed using the Flamingo Test, and dynamic balance was measured using the Timed Up and Go (TUG) test. After two sessions of learning exercises, the participants were reassessed. Statistical analysis was conducted using descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (ANCOVA and Shapiro-Wilk test) at a significance level of P<0.05. Results: The findings indicated that there was no significant difference between the groups in the pre-test, but after performing the learning exercises, the static balance of the implicit learning group showed a statistically significant improvement compared to the explicit learning group and the control group. However, there was no significant increase in dynamic balance performance in any of the groups. Conclusion: The results of this study support the claim that implicit learning exercises can have a positive and significant impact on the static balance performance of elderly individuals. It was also shown that implicit cognitive training had no effect on dynamic balance, which may indicate the important role of other variables such as motor control abilities.