November 13th 2024: Professor Alison Wray

Wednesday 13 November 2024 (Week 7 of term) 1.10 – 2.00pm, Room 3.58, John Percival Building

Blind spots in learning a language and a musical instrument: when your output doesn’t seem to reflect what you know

Professor Alison Wray (Cardiff University)

Two and a half years ago, I took up the piano (again) and soon encountered a problem with unanticipated errors appearing in passages I (thought I had) practised to death. Where were they coming from, and why was it those errors and not others? The experience resonated with the findings of an AHRC project I had conducted with Tess Fitzpatrick several years earlier (Fitzpatrick & Wray 2006; Wray & Fitzpatrick 2008), in which we enlisted language learners to memorise native-like sentences to use in future conversations. They, too, produced errors despite having the capacity to speak the sentences perfectly. So, could these two situations have something in common? In this talk, I consider whether the explanation we proposed for the errors in language learning might also apply to learning an instrument. How similar (or not) are these two types of learning? More generally, what can the research on learning in each domain teach us about the other?

References
Fitzpatrick, T., & Wray, A. 2006. Breaking up is not so hard to do: individual differences in L2 memorisation. Canadian Modern Language Review, 63: 35-57.
Wray, A., & Fitzpatrick, T. 2008. Why can’t you just leave it alone? Deviations from memorized language as a gauge of nativelike competence. In F. Meunier & S. Granger (Eds.), Phraseology in foreign language learning and teaching (pp. 123-148). Benjamins.