ABSTRACT

Language aptitude, or the ability to learn a language well or rapidly, is an important individual difference, explaining as much as 36% of the variance in learning outcomes. Recent proposals have distinguished between aptitudes for explicit and implicit learning, following calls for new aptitude constructs in educational and cognitive psychology. In this chapter, we report the results of an aptitude-treatment interaction study that looked at two aptitude profiles (high explicit–low implicit vs. low explicit–high implicit) under two instructional interventions that matched and mismatched each of the profiles (explicit vs. implicit corrective feedback). Thirty-one learners of Spanish were included in the study. A pretest-posttest randomized block design was followed. The matched profile under the implicit feedback condition outperformed the mismatched profile on direct object marking as measured by oral production, while the matched profile under the explicit feedback condition outperformed the mismatched profile on intra-phrasal gender agreement as measured by grammaticality judgments.