Implicit Knowledge Acquisition and Potential Challenges for Advanced Chinese and Spanish EFL Learners: A Word Monitoring Test on English Questions

This study aims to explore whether advanced EFL learners can acquire implicit knowledge of basic sentence structures, such as English questions. We ran a reaction-time experiment, a word monitoring test experiment to test learners’ implicit knowledge by checking advanced EFL learners’ grammatical sensitivity to English questions with five types of grammatical errors. The study recruited three groups of participants: native English speakers (n = 12), advanced Chinese EFL learners (n = 32), and advanced Spanish EFL learners (n = 37). Our results revealed that advanced EFL learners had not yet attained native-equivalent implicit grammar knowledge in English questions, despite their English proficiency level. The results also indicated that the learners’ different L1 languages do not impact advanced learners’ overall implicit knowledge acquisition but constitute influential factors for particular morphosyntactic inflections in English question formation.