Implicit and Explicit Knowledge About Language

Abstract

Children acquire their first language (L1) by engaging with their caretakers in natural meaningful communication. From this ``evidence'' they automatically acquire complex knowledge of the structure of their language. Yet paradoxically they cannot describe this knowledge, the discovery of which forms the object of the disciplines of theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and child language acquisition. This is a difference between explicit and implicit knowledge -- ask a young child how to form a plural and she says she does not know; ask her ``here is a wug, here is another wug, what have you got?'' and she is able to reply, ``two wugs.'' The acquisition of L1 grammar is implicit and is extracted from experience of usage rather than from explicit rules -- simple exposure to normal linguistic input suffices and no explicit instruction is needed. Adult acquisition of second language (L2) is a different matter in that what can be acquired implicitly from communicative contexts is typically quite limited in comparison to native speaker norms, and adult attainment of L2 accuracy usually requires additional resources of explicit learning. The various roles of consciousness in second language acquisition (SLA) include: the learner noticing negative evidence; their attending to language form; their perception focused by social scaffolding or explicit instruction; their voluntary use of pedagogical grammatical descriptions and analogical reasoning; their reflective induction of metalinguistic insights about language; and their consciously guided practice which results, eventually, in unconscious, automatized skill. From various divisions of cognitive neuroscience we know that implicit and explicit learning are distinct processes, that humans have separate implicit and explicit memory systems, that there are different types of knowledge of and about language, that these are stored in different areas of the brain, and that different educational experiences generate different types of knowledge.