Subjective measures of awareness

Subjective measures of awareness have been utilised based on the suggestion that the conscious/unconscious distinction should be defined in terms of subjective thresholds rather than objective thresholds (Rogers, 2016). Objective methods are designed to assess the conscious status of knowledge through tasks that are believed to reflect conscious or

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unconscious knowledge. It has been argued within the field of SLA that learners are more likely to depend on implicit knowledge when faced with timed grammaticality judgement tests, contrary to untimed grammaticality judgement tests that are likely to draw on explicit knowledge (R. Ellis et al., 2009; Godfroid et al., 2015).

In contrast to the objective methods that seek to determine the type of knowledge based on task performance alone, subjective measures of awareness essentially compare participants’ performance on a task with the extent to which they are able to identify (verbalise) the knowledge that guided their performance. Further, subjective methods assess either first-order or metacognitive levels of awareness (Timmermans & Cleeremans, 2015). First-order awareness refers to knowledge that the learner is able to report, such as the learners’ ability to verbalise the underlying grammatical rule. On the other hand, metacognitive levels of subjective awareness refer to participants’ awareness of their existing knowledge. An example is when learners are aware that they have learnt something but at the same time are unable to state exactly what they have learnt. In practice, metacognitive awareness might occur when a learner is very sure that an item in a grammaticality judgement task is not correct but he or she is unable to express the knowledge that has guided his or her decision.

It has been argued that the findings obtained from subjective measures of awareness reflect two distinct types of knowledge: structural knowledge and judgement knowledge (Dienes, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2013; Rebuschat, 2013; Rebuschat et al., 2013). Dienes (2004) described structural knowledge as knowledge that participants acquire about the underlying structure of stimuli during the experiment. An example is participants’ knowledge of a sequence of letters or word order in an experiment. Later, the participants develop a new type of knowledge when confronted with a new string or word order during the testing phase of an experiment, which is referred to as judgement knowledge. Base on this

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knowledge, the participants can judge whether the structures of the new items are similar to the structural features of the items in the training phase (Dienes, 2013). However, it is assumed that conscious structural knowledge leads to conscious judgement knowledge (Deines & Scott, 2005) and that unconscious structural knowledge can lead to judgement knowledge that is either conscious or unconscious (Rebuschat et al., 2013). To illustrate, unconscious structural knowledge and unconscious judgement knowledge are likely to occur in cases in which the participants think that they are guessing, but their performance implies that they have knowledge of the grammatical items being tested. Unconscious structural knowledge and conscious judgement knowledge would consist of a “fringe feeling” of correctness (Norman et al., 2007); that is, the participant would have a feeling that an item is grammatically correct or incorrect but would not know the reason (Dienes, 2010).

Subjective measures of awareness are classified in to two types: source attribution and confidence ratings. The first type, source attribution, is designed to assess judgement knowledge and can be administered alone (Dienes, 2004) or in combination with confidence ratings (Dienes & Scott, 2005; Rebuschat & Williams, 2012). The source attribution task instructs participants to identify the source on which participants based their decision by selecting one of the choices provided (e.g., guessing, intuition, memory, or rule knowledge). Confidence ratings, which is one of the methods employed in the present study, are used to assess the conscious state of judgement knowledge (Dienes et al., 1995). This measure asks participants to indicate their level of confidence in their decision for each judgement they make in the task (i.e., deciding whether a sentence is grammatical or ungrammatical) by selecting one of the choices provided, such as guessing, somewhat confident, or very confident. Dienes et al. (1995; see also Dienes, 2008; Rebuschat, 2013)

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argue that knowledge can be considered unconscious if there is no statistically significant relationship between the level of confidence and performance.

Within SLA, a number of recent studies have used subjective measures of awareness in their experimental design to assess the conscious status of participant knowledge (Dienes et al., 1995; Grey et al., 2014; Hamrick, 2013; Hamrick & Rebuschat, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015; Rebuschat, 2008; Rebuschat & Williams, 2006, 2009, 2012; Serafini; 2013). Most of those studies utilised subjective measures of awareness to investigate how awareness is guiding performance, as well as whether participants develop awareness over the course of the testing phase of the experiment (Hama & Leow, 2010; Rebuschat, 2008). For example, Rebuschat and Williams (2012) investigated the acquisition of grammar under incidental learning and used subjective measure of awareness to find out the nature of the resulting knowledge. Specifically, they investigated whether native English participants can acquire L2 German word order under incidental learning condition. In their study, participants were exposed to a semi-artificial language, which consists of English lexis and a syntactic rule system based on German word order; as in the example Usually defended Brian many shots during his matches. In exposure phase, participants were asked to listen to a sentence, repeat it aloud and then place their plausibility judgement based on content of the sentence. After this phase, participants were asked to complete a grammaticality judgement test, which they were not informed about beforehand. They were also instructed to complete confidence intervals and source attributions alongside each judgement on the grammaticality judgement test. At the end of the test, retrospective verbal reports were administered in addition to the subjective measures of awareness. The findings indicated that L2 word order can be acquired through incidental exposure. Moreover, the analysis of the subjective measure of awareness and the

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retrospective verbal reports revealed evidence that the observed learning effect was partly driven by unconscious knowledge of the underlying syntactic rule system.

The findings obtained from the subjective measures of awareness used in the previous studies were advantageous in that they were suitable for revealing low levels of awareness, which could be seen as a relationship between the level of confidence and accuracy during performance. Another advantage of the subjective measure of awareness is that it allows for a clear insight in to how awareness is guiding performance, as these types of measures are taken on a question-by-question basis throughout an experiment (Rogers, 2016).