Running Head: ARTICLE CRITIQUE

Article Critique

Mengzi Cai

Colorado State University

ARTICLE CRITIQUE

Class: E527
Name: Mengzi Cai
Critique of Morgan-short et al. (2012）

Summary
The purpose of this research is to find out the effect of explicit and implicit learning
methods on learners’ ability to gain native speaker cognitive patterns when learners study the
second language and whether the patterns have relation with the performance. This research paid
close attention to the ERP measures which is related to the electrophysiological measures in the
brain because previous researches only focus on performance result. In addition, this article
referred to performance and behavior as measures of proficiency which they differentiated from
neural measures from ERPs. The authors took 41 participants who were right-handed and fluent
in English but not in any other language and used the ERP to test the explicit and implicit
learning. The instrument they used to measure both proficiency and neural advancements was an
artificial language. The result showed that there is no difference between explicit and implicit in
performance on proficiency, but under the implicit condition the ERP results showed that
learners gained neural patterns most similar with the native-speaker brain patterns for language
processing whereas the explicit condition did not.

Critique
The purpose of using the artificial language is to avoid the L1 influence or cognates from
the L1 transferring. In particular, the artificial language used in this study was designed with the
different features with English, like the subject-object-verb order and gender in articles and
adjective as well as post-positioned articles and adjectives. What’s more, the artificial language
is helpful to follow the longitudinal learning from low to high proficiency and it is no previous
exposure because it is the new language. The authors mentioned that the artificial language is
similar with Roman language so exposure to any Roman language should be restricted.
Therefore, they removed the participants who are more than 3 years of classroom exposure and
two weeks of immersion in Romance language. However, how did they determine that these two
conditions equated to the same level of Roman language ability? Learners with more than three
ARTICLE CRITIQUE

years classroom exposure may have a lower proficiency than the learners with 2 weeks
immersion or visa-versa. It is hard to determine that these two conditions are equal.
The participants also needed to have the pretraining. During the pretraining session, they
were introduced to the computer-based game and learned the names of four game token. There
didn’t seem to be a clear rationale for using a computer game as the method for delivering
implicit and explicit teaching. I think the pretraining is related to the explicit learning which
might have slight effect on the accuracy of result. In other words, I didn’t feel there was enough
differentiation between the explicit and implicit pretraining. While the explicit did receive
metalinguistic explanations and the implicit group did not, how could the pretraining equally
prepare the participants. In addition, how could previous language learning experiences have
affected the participants. In this research, I gained the conclusion that the L2 learning
acquisition can gain the L1 neurocognitive mechanism along with proficiency based on the
learning conditions such as explicit and implicit. The implication for the ESL class is that the
instructor could pay more attention to the implicit learning instead of setting up only explicit
conditions in class.
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Reference

Morgan-Short, Kara, Steinhauer, Karsten, Sanz, Cristina, & Ullman, Michael T. (n.d.). Explicit
and Implicit Second Language Training Differentially Affect the Achievement of
Native-like Brain Activation Patterns. Early Access (Early Access), 933-947.