The Effect of Explicit Instruction on Implicit and Explicit Linguistic Knowledge in Kindergartners

Research consistently shows that adults engaged in tutored acquisition benefit from explicit instruction several linguistic domains. For preschool children, it is often assumed such does not make a difference. In the present study, we investigated whether affected young learners acquiring morpho-syntactic element. A total of 103 Dutch-speaking kindergartners (M = 5;7) received training miniature language to learn meaningful agreement marker. Results picture matching task, during which eye movements were recorded, provided no evidence led higher accuracy rates, but suggest did lead earlier predictive movements. These data seem incompatible with idea difference when grammatical element, and tentatively has different effect on knowledge than implicit this age group.