Background:

While certain implicit learning studies suggest that specific types of learning can occur without attention, the majority of evidence actually supports the contrary assertion that attention is necessary for learning in these experiments. Nonetheless, it is undoubtedly accurate that certain types of learning demand greater concentration than others. In statistical learning tasks, individuals can easily learn relationships between nearby stimuli (similar to phoneme identification and word segmentation), whereas acquiring non-adjacent dependencies (more akin to syntax) poses greater challenges and appears to rely on whether the distant items can be made adjacent through attentional mechanisms. Also, while it is accurate that detection (the acknowledgment of a stimulus) may happen beneath the threshold of conscious awareness, this typically applies only to representations that are already formed; in other words, although subliminal perception exists, subliminal learning does not. While criticisms of the Noticing Hypothesis cannot be easily disregarded, and some undeniably hold validity. Certain types of learning necessitate increased concentration and elevated levels of awareness compared to others. For instance, a significant degree of learning must occur before learners can effectively break down the speech flow into distinguishable words that can be recognized by the learner. No research has demonstrated that individuals learn more effectively under dual task conditions compared to single task conditions, nor that disregarding grammatical forms in input leads to improved learning results than paying attention to forms and developing hypotheses about them. Certainly, overt knowledge (acquired either through teaching or deliberate induction) tends to exert predominantly beneficial effects on learning via exposure and interaction, as “learning with advance organizers and hints is always more effective than learning without cues”. As numerous learners who depend solely on interaction and exposure often do not achieve native-like grammatical accuracy, there is ample justification to suggest that individual variations in how attentively learners notice and focus on grammatical features of the input may partially explain their differing success in this dimension of language acquisition.

Goal/Rationale:

Attention and awareness (the subjective counterpart of attention) are vital ideas for comprehending second and foreign language acquisition. In SLA, the allocation of attention serves as the crucial juncture where external learner factors (such as input complexity and distribution, the context of discourse and interaction, instructional methods, and task features) intersect with internal learner factors (including motivation, aptitude, learning styles and strategies, current L2 knowledge, and processing skills). What occurs in attentional space significantly influences the trajectory of language development, encompassing knowledge expansion (creation of new representations) and fluency progression (retrieval of those representations). Evidence keeps piling up that awareness significantly influences second and foreign language acquisition. Personal variations play a significant role in the narrative, with both tendencies and skills influencing who observes what. The ability for explicit learning contributes to mitigating age-related deficiencies in implicit learning. A lot still needs to be accomplished to connect “noticing” with similar concepts like cognitive style, depth of processing, self-regulation, and executive attention. It appears that there are also individual differences in the capacity for implicit learning. These have only just started to be examined, yet this represents a promising field for forthcoming research, which might also beneficially incorporate a study to discover how life histories and literacy influence both explicit and implicit learning capabilities, along with multilingualism.