| Previous research has demonstrated that monolinguals benefit from implicit memory in their processing of speech. For example, language users respond faster and/or more accurately to spoken words they have encountered recently than they do to words they have not recently encountered, even if they have not intentionally or consciously attended to such words. Thus, auditory word priming appears to be an effective mechanism used in the learning of sounds and words in response to recent experience. The three objectives of this study were to determine (1) whether second-language (L2) learners use auditory word priming as monolinguals do when they are acquiring an L2, (2) how attentional processing orientation influences the extent to which they do so, and (3) what it is that L2 learners actually “learn” from speech as they use auditory word priming.; Thus, for this study, 60 intermediate-level learners of Spanish as an L2 participated in an auditory word-priming experiment in English and Spanish. The learners studied a set of words in English (e.g., “ready,” “together”) and in Spanish (e.g., “escuchar,” “también”) under two processing-orientation conditions—auditory (i.e., when attending to word forms) and semantic (i.e., when attending to word meanings)—and under a condition that did not include a processing orientation. They were later tested in a word-repetition task on a larger set of words in English and Spanish, half of which were the previously studied words and half of which were new words.; Results revealed that (1) L2 learners use auditory word priming when they are acquiring an L2, (2) the extent to which they do so depends upon L2 learners' attention to the form of spoken input, and (3) L2 learners over-rely on detailed information about spoken words (e.g., information about a speaker's voice) as they use auditory word priming. These findings indicated that auditory word priming is both an implicit and crucial learning mechanism involved in the processing and learning of L2 speech. These findings also indicated that the extent of this involvement depends upon the nature of spoken L2 input and the processing demands imposed on the learner by a learning task. |
