Processing Principles

The three empirical investigations that we have presented in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 all shared the same overarching goal, which was to move Processing Instruction research into a new area or strand of investigation. Our work explored previously uncharted territory with respect to what we know about the effects of Processing Instruction on second language acquisition. We have demonstrated in the three experiments that Processing Instruction not only gives learners the direct or primary benefit of learning to process and produce the morphological form on which they received instruction, but also a secondary benefit in that they transferred that training to processing and producing another morphological form on which they had received no instruction. Additionally, our third experiment presented in Chapter 5 showed a cumulative benefit of Processing Instruction in that learners transferred their training processing morphology to processing and producing a syntactic construction.

Our research on Processing Instruction is framed by VanPatten's work (empirical and theoretical) on input processing (VanPatten, 1996, 2004a, 2007b). We presented the Processing Principles associated with his theoretical framework in Chapter 1. We also presented some of the empirical work from which VanPatten developed the principles, as well as other empirical work that supports the principles. In Table 6.1, we provide a summary of the Processing Principles that framed our investigations.

In Chapter 4 we presented research on the acquisition of English verb morphology by native speakers of Korean learning English in a Korean middle school. The two target linguistic items were the simple past tense marker -ed and the third person singular, present tense marker -s. The acquisition of both morphemes is affected by the Lexical Preference Principle: 'learners will tend to rely on lexical items as opposed to grammatical form to get meaning when both encode the same semantic information' (VanPatten, 2004b: 9). Tense or time is often signalled in ways other than morphological inflection. Real world context often signals when the event expressed took place, takes place or will take place.