To the best of my memory and belief - Learning new language forms

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Franzy

The study proposes a previously unexamined factor behind differences in vocabulary learning between native and foreign language development: adolescents’ critical thinking. It hypothesizes that difficulties in foreign vocabulary growth stem from the learner’s readiness to question new information. Drawing on the idea that rigorous critical thought emerges late, the paper links children’s fast mapping success to an absence of doubt, where questionable input is filtered out of long-term memory. Experimental results indicate that memory for new language forms improves when learners are convinced of their validity.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages17

Reading Time43 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Introduction

Vocabulary learning and learner proficiency

Belief, doubt, and memory filtering

Self-efficacy vs. validity belief

Literature review

The role of belief and doubt

| | | | --- | --- | | Australian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 4 (1), 1–17 (2021) [https://doi.org/10.29140ajal.v4n1.376](https://doi.org/10.29140ajal.v4n1.376)
To the best of my memory and belief: Learning new language forms
KONRAD SZCZEŚNIAK a
HANNA SITTER b | | | a Palacky University Olomouc, Czechia b University of Silesia, Poland
konrad.szczesniak@upol.cz [h.sitter@us.edu.pl](h.sitter@us.edu.pl) | | | Abstract
We propose a previously unexamined factor instrumental in learning vocabulary accounting for the differences between learning a native and a foreign language: the development of critical thinking in adolescence. We hypothesize that the difficulties experienced in foreign vocabulary development result from the learner’s readiness to question new information. Following Gilbert’s (1991) claim that rigorous critical thought is the last to emerge and children are prone to accept propositionsuncritically, we suggest that it is to this absence of doubt that children owe their success in remembering lexical items after a single exposure, a phenomenon referred to as fast mapping. The rationale is that the mental belief systems are memory’s filtering mechanism for what to retain: information labelled as questionable is allowed to decay without being granted access to long-term memory. We present the results of an experiment suggesting that memory of new language forms is enhanced by the learner’s conviction in their validity.
Keywords: lexical memory, belief, formulaicity | | | Introduction
An important question in second language acquisition research is what is responsible for the varying levels of proficiency in different learners, or as Dewaele (2013) puts it:
A familiar question … is why the learning process is a such struggle, leading to limited proficiency for some learners, while others in the same situation seem to breeze through and attain high levels of proficiency in the L2 . (Dewaele, 2013, p. 159) | | Copyright: © 2021 Konrad Szcześniak & Hanna Sitter. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within this paper. The struggle becomes all the more obvious when considered against the backdrop of children’s all but offhand success in acquiring their mother tongue. A review of the ample literature, with its often conflicting hypotheses, suggests that little is really known about either the secret behind children’s spontaneous linguistic development or the obstacles impeding foreign language learning; there is a sense that language mastery should depend on a number of factors, and not a single determinant. Indeed, it is only reasonable to assume that the picture is complex and it would perhaps appear naïveto postulate a single variable solely responsible for the entire process. However, it is important to be clear on what that complexity inherent to acquisition really means in practice. There may indeed be a number of variables at play (e.g., motivation, innate predispositions, attention span etc.), but the fact remains that the uniformity with which children become native speakers would not be possible if successful language acquisition were contingent on a rare alignment of unrelated factors. Further, the struggle of foreign language learning suggests that whatever the secret may be, it should be correlated with age. That is, the ease characteristic of child language acquisition and the laborious ways of language learning in adults point to the operation of some robust but elusive factor shared by children, but blocked, disrupted, or otherwise lost in later development. This study will argue that one such factor has to do with the learner’s perception of the validity of encountered input. More specifically,

FAQs

What new factor does the paper propose for vocabulary learning?

It proposes development of critical thinking in adolescence as an instrumental factor affecting how vocabulary is learned in native versus foreign languages.

How does “fast mapping” relate to belief and doubt?

The paper suggests children’s success after a single exposure comes from a lack of doubt, allowing lexical items to be retained because questionable information can decay without reaching long-term memory.

How is the studied belief different from self-efficacy?

Self-efficacy concerns perceived ability to perform tasks, while the belief investigated here concerns whether the learner believes the accuracy of a new language form encountered in the input.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Franzy