Individual differences in children's response to explicit instruction: effects of age and memory ability

This study investigated how declarative memory (DM), procedural memory (PM), and working memory (WM) capacities support additional language (L2) learning under explicit instruction from middle childhood to early adolescence, a period marked by substantial cognitive development yet underrepresented in L2 research. 50 learners aged eight to thirteen were trained on an artificial language composed of transitive sentences with animated scenes in a cross-situational learning paradigm. Vocabulary and grammar learning required tracking co-occurrences between features of sentences and scenes, and integrating an explicitly instructed grammar rule (i.e. sentence word order), presented prior to exposure. We found that, in this explicitly instructed learning context, DM predicted grammar learning, while PM related positively to grammar learning only for older children. Furthermore, phonological short-term memory predicted grammar rule learning, while complex WM predicted verb learning. The results suggest that learning in an explicitly instructed context may vary as a function of learners’ age and cognitive profiles.