LISTENING AUTOMATICITY: A REDUCTION OF DUAL-TASK INTERFERENCE AND WORKING MEMORY DEMANDS

Abstract

According to cognitive psychologists, consistent practice (i.e., tasks with a high degree of similarity) of a skill leads to the development of automaticity, with the degree of automatization being increased if the practice also involves exact repetition. Practice is skill specific, meaning that practicing one skill does not automatize related skills. Once achieved, automaticity has been characterized as the ability to perform a primary task with little interference from performing a concurrent secondary task. A second key characteristic of skill automatization is that it involves a gradual decrease in executive working memory (EWM) demands. The primary purpose of this study is to examine whether such claims put forth by cognitive psychologists are transferable to the automatization of second language (L2) bottom-up listening skills. The secondary purpose of this study is to explore whether reading while listening promotes listening automaticity to a greater extent than listening only, as has been argued in the L2 literature (Chang, 2011; Chang & Millett, 2014; Chang and Millett, 2016; Chang et al., 2018). The third purpose of this study is to examine whether visuospatial working memory (VWM) is a predictor of listening automaticity growth and to what degree it is related to EWM.Although L2 listening is regarded as a cognitive skill, the automatization of L2 listening has not been researched as described by cognitive psychologists. That is, using dual tasks and a reduction in EWM involvement as indices of automaticity, and providing consistent practice with an exact repetition component. In addition, the existing research into the question surrounding what kind of practice is more effective in bringing about L2 listening automaticity –listening while reading or listening only¬– has methodological flaws that have led to an inconclusive answer. To fill these gaps in the literature, I designed a listening-while-reading and a listening-only intervention that blended elements claimed to be conducive to automaticity development in cognitive psychology and L2 research, namely consistent training and exact repetition of stimuli and time pressure, while taking into account the methodological issues of previous L2 research. Data were collected from 290 Japanese high school students, who were assigned to the listening-while-reading, the listening-only, or a control group. Participants in the listening-only intervention listened to texts composed of a narrow range of vocabulary and grammar structures, which warranted consistency, whose speech rates increased by 10 words per minute (wpm) over the sessions from 100 wpm to 180 wpm. The listening-while-reading intervention involved listening to the same texts while reading the transcripts. Exact repetition of the stimuli was provided in both interventions by playing the texts two consecutive times in each intervention session. After the second listening, comprehension was assessed using a Japanese summary of the texts and a set of five multiple-choice questions. Degree of automatization was measured at three time points (i.e., Pretest, Posttest 1, and Posttest 2) separated by two cycles of training, through two dual tasks at each time point. The dual tasks, which consisted of listening to a text delivered at 160 wpm while drawing a series of vertical lines on blank paper and were followed by the abovementioned comprehension measures, were used to construct measures of automaticity. Dual-task data were linked through a Rasch longitudinal design, keeping text difficulty invariant across the dual tasks, with Rasch person measures for comprehension for subsequent analyses computed by combining scores on summaries and multiple-choice questions, while giving double weight to the summaries. Regarding the memory constructs, EWM was assessed through a speaking and a listening span task, whose scores were combined into a global EWM Rasch measure that was used in the analyses to test if the participants’ EWM costs diminished over time. Similarly, a single VWM Rasch measure was calculated by combining the participants’ scores on the Mr. Peanut task (DeAvila, 1974), which assesses visual memory, and the Corsi block span task (Corsi, 1972), which assesses spatial memory, as additional predictors of L2 listening automaticity. To my knowledge, measures of VWM have not previously been employed as predictors of listening ability. Results from a repeated-measures ANOVA and a multi-group latent growth model indicated that both intervention groups automatized their listening skills to a greater extent than the control group with the listening-only group developing automaticity to the largest extent. Although a reduction of EWM demands was not observed, possibly because the participants were not complete beginners and might have started the study with some degree of automaticity, the fact that they could perform the dual tasks less effortfully over time evidenced automatization. Interestingly, VWM significantly predicted growth in listening automaticity, which was interpreted to mean that as listeners automatize their listening skills, they become able to see what they hear. This result was explained in terms of attentional capacity limits, where higher-level processes, such as visualizing input, cannot be achieved until the lower-level processes such as word recognition or grammatical parsing have been automatized. Follow-up qualitative interviews corroborated the quantitative findings and extended them by suggesting that a small number of training sessions might be sufficient to develop listening automaticity. Results of an additional correlation analysis further showed that VWM and EWM are not highly related as has been shown by some experimental evidence in the working memory literature. The finding that listening only was superior to listening while reading is important because it contradicts previous research and suggests that to automatize listening, one needs to practice in real-operating conditions. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed. First, listening to texts whose speech rates increase over the practice sessions promotes listening automaticity. Next, claims by cognitive psychologists regarding the development of skill automaticity are largely generalizable to the natural conditions of classroom-based research focusing on the acquisition of real-world skills such as L2 listening. Last, the multi-component versus the unitary view of working memory.