Effects of task repetition with written corrective feedback on the knowledge and written accuracy of learners with different prior knowledge of the structure

Previous task repetition studies have largely overlooked the second language learners’ development of linguistic knowledge as well as written accuracy. Furthermore, sufficient attention has not been paid to the role of written corrective feedback (WCF) in task repetition to reinforce attention to form. Moreover, studies exploring task repetition effects on learners with different prior knowledge of the target structure are rare. This study attempted to bridge these lacunas. Seventy-nine upper-intermediate learners in Iran were divided into four groups: task repetition with no feedback (TR), task repetition with metalinguistic feedback (TR+M), task repetition with direct feedback (TR+D), and task repetition with mixed direct metalinguistic feedback (TR+DM). All groups performed an error correction test that measured explicit knowledge, an elicited imitation test that tapped automatized explicit knowledge, and a picture-cued written production test that measured written accuracy. Participants performed a dictogloss task and received WCF before repeating the same task. Subsequently, they performed another dictogloss task with different content. Results revealed that the +Prior Knowledge learners in the TR+DM group gained explicit knowledge and proved slightly better than the TR+D regarding written accuracy. None of the groups, however, could develop automatized explicit knowledge.

Robustness tests provide further support for an ecological account of the truth and fake news by repetition effects

Corneille et al. (2020) found that repetition increases judgments that statements have been used as fake news on social media, a result that is consistent with an ecological theorization. They also found that repetition increases truth judgments and decreases falsehood judgments (i.e., two instantiations of the Truth-by-Repetition effect), which is more compatible with the ecological account than with competing accounts. However, the first author of the present article found unsuspected programming issues in Corneille et al.’s experiments. These programming issues introduced confounds that may have been responsible for the results. To estimate whether Corneille et al.’s results and main claims hold when correcting these issues, the current team agreed on two high-powered preregistered replications of Corneille et al.’s experiments (N total = 540). The findings strongly support Corneille et al.’s predictions, which substantiates and generalizes an ecological account of repetition effects on judgment.

Repetition effects in action planning reflect effector- but not hemisphere-specific coding

Action choices are influenced by future and recent past action states. For example, when performing two actions in succession, response times (RT) to initiate the second action are reduced when the same hand is used. These findings suggest the existence of effector-specific processing for action planning. However, given that each hand is primarily controlled by the contralateral hemisphere, the RT benefit might actually reflect effector-independent, hemisphere-specific rather than effector-specific repetition effects. Here, participants performed two consecutive movements, each with a hand or a foot, in one of two directions. Direction was specified in an egocentric reference frame (inward, outward) or in an allocentric reference frame (left, right). Successive actions were initiated faster when the same limb (e.g., left hand - left hand), but not when the other limb of the same body side (e.g., left foot - left hand) executed the second action. The same-limb advantage was evident even when the two movements involved different directions, whether specified egocentrically or allocentrically. Corroborating evidence from computational modeling lends support to the claim that repetition effects in action planning reflect persistent changes in baseline activity within neural populations that encode effector-specific action plans.

Intraspeaker Priming across the New Zealand English Short Front Vowel Shift

A growing body of research in psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics shows that we have a strong tendency to repeat linguistic material that we have recently produced, seen, or heard. The present paper investigates whether priming effects manifest in continuous phonetic variation the way it has been reported in phonological, morphological, and syntactic variation. We analyzed nearly 60,000 tokens of vowels involved in the New Zealand English short front vowel shift (SFVS), a change in progress in which trap/dress move in the opposite direction to kit, from a topic-controlled corpus of monologues (166 speakers), to test for effects that are characteristic of priming phenomena: repetition, decay, and lexical boost. Our analysis found evidence for all three effects. Tokens that were relatively high and front tended to be followed by tokens that were also high and front; the repetition effect weakened with greater time between the prime and target; and the repetition effect was stronger if the prime and target belonged to (different tokens of) the same word. Contrary to our expectations, however, the cross-vowel effects suggest that the repetition effect responded not to the direction of vowel changes within the SFVS, but rather the peripherality of the tokens. We also found an interaction between priming behavior and gender, with stronger repetition effects among men than women. While these findings both indicate that priming manifests in continuous phonetic variation and provide further evidence that priming is among the factors providing structure to intraspeaker variation, they also challenge unitary accounts of priming phenomena.

Is there magnocellular facilitation of early neural processes underlying visual word recognition? Evidence from masked repetition priming with ERPs

An influential theory in the field of visual object recognition proposes that fast magnocellular (M) information facilitates neural processing of spatially more fine-grained but slower parvocellular (P) information. While written words can be considered as a special type of visual objects, it is unknown whether magnocellular facilitation also plays a role in reading. We used a masked priming paradigm that has been shown to result in neural facilitation in visual word processing and tested whether these facilitating effects are mediated by the magnocellular system. In two experiments, we manipulated the influence of magnocellular and parvocellular systems on visual processing of a contextually predictable target character by contrasting high versus low spatial frequency and luminance versus color contrast, respectively. In addition, unchanged (normal) primes were included in both experiments as a manipulation check. As expected, unchanged primes elicited typical repetition effects in the N1, N250 and P3 components of the ERP in both experiments. In the experiment manipulating spatial contrast, we obtained repetition effects only for the N1 component for both M- and P-biased primes. In the luminance versus color contrast experiment, repetition effects were found in N1 and N250 for both M- and P- biased primes. Furthermore, no interactions were found between M- vs. P-biased prime types and repetition. Together these results indicate that M- and P- information contributes jointly to early neural processes underlying visual word recognition.

Repetition effects in action selection reflect effector- but not hemisphere-specific coding

Action choices are influenced by future and recent past action states. For example, when performing two actions in succession, response times (RT) to initiate the second action are reduced when the same hand is used. These findings suggest the existence of effector-specific processing for action selection. However, given that each hand is primarily controlled by the contralateral hemisphere, the RT benefit might actually reflect body side or hemisphere-specific rather than effector-specific repetition effects. Here, participants performed two consecutive movements, each with a hand or a foot, in one of two directions. Direction was specified in an egocentric reference frame (inward, outward) or in an allocentric reference frame (left, right). Successive actions were initiated faster when the same limb (e.g., left hand - left hand), but not when the other limb of the same body side (e.g., left foot - left hand) executed the second action. The same-limb advantage was evident even when the two movements involved different directions, whether specified egocentrically or allocentrically. Corroborating evidence from computational modeling lends support to the claim that repetition effects in action selection reflect persistent changes in baseline activity within neural populations that encode effector-specific action plans.

Focus on form in task repetition through oral and written task modeling

This study expands upon research into task repetition effects by exploring the effect of task modeling between the performances of the same oral narrative task and its extension to a new task. Seventy-one advanced beginner English as a foreign language (EFL) learners were divided into three groups: task repetition with oral modeling (TR + OM), task repetition with written modeling (TR + WM), and task repetition with no modeling (TR). All groups enacted another oral narrative task (a new task of the same type), three days apart. Participants’ oral narrative task performances were analyzed in terms of complexity, accuracy and fluency. Results revealed that TR + WM was more effective than the TR + OM, and both were significantly better than the control group in leading to subordination complexity in the repeated task and the new task. Whereas the percentage of error-free clauses remained unchanged over time, the accurate verb forms increased in TR + WM’s repeated task, but declined in the new task. Fluency in terms of articulation speed and mid-clause silent pauses was improved and maintained in the new task in all groups, with both the experimental groups particularly the TR + OM outperforming the TR regarding the significant reduction of repair in the repeated and new task performances. In conclusion, these significant developments induced by the modeling conditions speak to the strength of models in providing and extending linguistic features beyond learners’ current repertoires. Pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed.