THE EFFECTS OF TOPIC FAMILIARITY, MODE, AND PAUSING ON SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS’ COMPREHENSION AND FOCUS ON FORM

Research in first language and second language (L2) comprehension has demonstrated that both learner and input variables contribute to the ease with which a message is understood. Questions remain, however, as to how these variables affect the way L2 learners process linguistic form during comprehension. This study examines how one learner variable (topic familiarity) and two input variables (mode and pausing) affect learners’ comprehension and their processing of a new morphological form (the Spanish future tense) in the input. Two hundred sixty-six participants in an accelerated beginning Spanish course either read or listened to a short narrative in Spanish on either a familiar topic or an unfamiliar one. Additionally, half of the listening groups encountered 3-second pauses between each sentence. After listening to or reading the passages, the participants performed two comprehension tasks (recall protocol and multiple-choice test) and two form-assessment tasks (form-recognition task and tense identification/translation). The results revealed that, although all three variables affected learners’ comprehension, only mode affected learners’ processing future tense morphology.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference Form-Meaning Connections in Second Language Acquisition held in Chicago in February, 2002. This paper is based on my doctoral dissertation completed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am extremely grateful to Bill VanPatten for his guidance during the entire process of the research project as well as to James F. Lee, Diane Musumeci, Alice Omaggio Hadley, and Anna María Escobar for their feedback and encouragement. I also wish to thank the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their insightful and critical comments. All errors and omissions are, of course, my own.