<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=iso-8859-1"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Dear Liam,<div> I am referring to a study that my grad student Colleen Davy did as a part of her work on training fluency in Intermediate Spanish. There was already some commentary on this in earlier messages. As I mentioned there, questions the idea that elicited imitation involves mere parroting:</div><div><div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px; font-size: 12px; ">Erlam, R. (2006). Elicited imitation as a measure of L2 implicit knowledge: An empirical validation study. <i>Applied Linguistics, 27</i>, 464-491. </div><div><br></div><div>The same issue was explored in:</div><div><div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px; font-size: 12px; ">DeKeyser, R. (2003). Implicit and explicit learning. In C. Doughty & M. Long (Eds.), <i>The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition</i> (pp. 313-349). Oxford: Blackwell.</div></div><div><br></div><div>Basically, people in second language would like to be able to use elicited imitation as a measure of "implicit learning" by which they usually mean non-conscious and non-tutored learning. As in first language studies, these elicited imitation tests can include all sorts of structures, both grammatical and ungrammatical, so they are a great way of exploring this issue. However, people (i.e. reviewers) often object to the use of elicited imitation, because they think that somehow learners can just fill up their short-term memory buffer with a series of words in the second language and repeat those words without really understanding the grammatical structure at all. Never mind the fact that the same learners (both L1 and L2) can't repeat strings of 4-5 unrelated words in the second language. </div><div><br></div><div>To deal with this objection, Colleen contrasted learning under a variety of conditions. For the current issue, the important comparison was between basic sentence repetition (listen-repeat) in Study 1 and a method in Study 2 that required participants to produce the sentences without any immediately previous verbal stimulus. Instead, the participants (college students) learned the Spanish phrases that described certain pictures, such as el cocine la cena 'he cooks dinner' or ella sugiere 'she suggests' on the basis of clip art pictures. A combination of the two pictures would trigger the sentence "ella sugiere que el cocine la cena". In this way, practice on the sentence would occur without elicited imitation. For the purposes of the current discussion, the important result is that the two techniques led to parallel improvements in fluency. There are other results in the study in terms of the fluency-accuracy tradeoff and the effects of using small units vs. full sentences, but the important thing here is the parallel nature of the results across the methods. In the one method, it is clear that sentence planning is driven by meaningful content. Showing that the effects are the same in the other method tends to support the idea that that method also depends on processing of meaningful content. Of course, one could always say that the parallel nature of the outcome is an accident or due to other factors.</div><div><br></div><div>Unfortunately, this study is under review, so you can't really use these results to defend the method. But you can point to Erlam, DeKeyser, and the articles from Lust et al. and McKee cited earlier.</div><div><br></div><div>-Brian MacWhinney</div><div><br></div><div><div>On Mar 10, 2013, at 3:34 PM, Liam Blything <<a href="mailto:liamblything@gmail.com">liamblything@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">Thank you Brian, Ana, <span style="font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">Nan, and Roberto for your thoughts. If I follow the advice in those links, then imitation certainly seems to be worthwhile.</span></div><div style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"><br></div><div><font face="arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">Brian, I would be interested if you are willing to talk a bit more about your forthcoming study that imitation does include "an aspect of comprehension or at least adequate parsing." This extra requirement in imitation tasks means that </span></font><font face="arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">it might it be best to run an </span>additional </font><span style="font-size: 12.800000190734863px; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">study where the comprehension aspect is removed. For example, an elicited production task </span><span style="font-size: 12.800000190734863px; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">with <i>blocked</i> presentations of each condition (e.g., in each blocked session, we emphasise through training trials that we want all sentences to use a specific connective/construction) is </span><font face="arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">still designed to restrict what the child says, but has no comprehension element. I am aware of the limitations of a blocked design, but if the pattern remains the same for both paradigms then reviewers/critics would have little argument that my imitation conclusions are influenced by comprehension/parsing demands. </span></font></div><div><font face="arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font face="arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">Any thoughts are very welcome!</span></font></div><div><font face="arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"><br></span></font></div><div style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">Liam Blything</div><div style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"><font color="#999999">Lancaster University PhD student.</font></div><div class="yj6qo ajU" style="cursor: pointer; outline: none; padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; width: 22px; margin-top: 2px; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"></div><br>On Friday, 8 March 2013 17:31:10 UTC, Liam Blything wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0;margin-left: 0.8ex;border-left: 1px #ccc solid;padding-left: 1ex;"><div dir="ltr"><div><div><div>Hello all,<br></div>
<br>
</div>Can anyone give me some advice on what age-groups are too old for an <u>elicited imitation paradigm</u>? I have read that 4 years old is quite an old age to use this paradigm, but other studies have used it up to 7 years old.<br><br> I am eliciting two clause sentences linked by a connective (before, after). When do children become at high-risk for simply 'parrotting' the target sentence?<br clear="all"></div>
<div><br>Many thanks for any thoughts,<div><img src="https://mail.google.com/mail/images/cleardot.gif"><font color="#888888"><br><span style="">Liam Blything</span><br>Lancaster University PhD student.<br></font></div><span><font color="#888888"></font></span><span></span></div></div></blockquote><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div>
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