Decoding Language with Ben

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Declarative vs. procedural memory in language learning: What every learner & teacher should know

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121: Learning from LLMs (with Adele Goldberg) | Because Language Get more from Because Language on Patreon

new interview with Adele Goldberg on the constructionist approach to understanding how language works

recommended listening for all language learners (skip to 47min mark)

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Thanks for the opportunity, Because Language! 👇

thank you Matt!

here's how:

• if you encounter a sentence you don't understand, paste it into your favourite LLM and ask it to explain the forms and what they mean (don't ask for a complex grammar breakdown, or whole sentence translation)

• however, if you are focussed on listening to way things are said, or written, and simply thinking "what does that mean?" this is the kind of attention that allows your brain to engage in procedural memory encoding.

here's why:

• there is a difference between analysing and understanding a sentence, and detecting a pattern.
• if you are focussed on trying to remember rules, and analysing sentences, this is a declarative memory activity.

here is the big takeaway from all this:

it's far more effective to use grammar as a way to understand sentences during input, rather than trying to memorise a grammar rule, and using your memory of that rule to understand a sentence.

i.e. the pattern is internalised after noticing instances of the pattern in input, or practising sentences using the pattern—especially when the task makes the grammatical form more meaningful and salient, i.e. you can't understand what is being said unless you understand the grammatical pattern

• grammar rules are only internalised through input and output ...

• more frequent grammar rules tend to be remembered and used, which tend to be the simpler rules (like -ed implies past tense), and the more complex (and less frequent) rules tend to be forgotten because they show up input less often

• the way in which grammar is taught is critically important: when grammar patterns are taught in an input-focussed way, e.g. reading a story, drawing students attention to which sentences are past-tense, then the learning effects are much larger

here are the most important findings:

• turns out that explicit teaching of grammar rules has only a modest effect on student's ability to comprehend language that uses those rules at a later date

more recent research has focussed on testing whether student's real time comprehension improves after receiving grammar instruction.

i was gobsmacked when i learned this, due to the obvious circular reasoning—"grammar study is effective because the research shows it is effective, the research shows it is effective because students remember the grammar rules after they have been taught them"

up until the 2000s, most research on grammar practice was determining the effectiveness of grammar study by how well students remembered grammar rules.

there are, however, some important caveats!

however, the explicit knowledge of grammar and vocabulary (in declarative memory) CAN make it easier for you to process language input, because it helps your brain notice the patterns, and this allows your brain to proceduralise the grammar patterns you learned.

now here's an important fact—the brain cannot shuffle information between declarative memory and procedural memory.

when you are doing something that is very focussed and goal orientated, like memorising your grocery list, remembering a new face—this activates processes that encode information into declarative memory.

humans have been trying to learn languages this way for 1000s of years, it seems intuitive, because we can analyse language, point to words on the page, so it seems like we just need to remember it all and then we can speak, right? wrong.

so what happens when you study language in an analytical way, focussing on grammar rules, memorising individual words and their translations?

in this situation, you’re encoding information into declarative memory, a different part of the brain to where you want language to be.

you're watching football eating a bag of chips, you won't remember every play made in the game, but after watching enough games, through the exposure to the patterns in football your brain is able to make predictions about where the ball is going, a sense of which team is playing a better and so on

here's an example:

eventually, the relevant neural pathways become so sensitive to a pattern in the input that you are able to consciously notice them—maybe you recognise a specific phrase being said.

patterns are encoded into procedural memory when your brain is processing a stream of data with diffused focus.

this results from a similar learning process to how you learned to catch a ball—first you pay diffuse attention to the stream of language input, you don't understand it, but each exposure to a pattern leaves a small impressions in your procedural memory.

your brain knows what word sequences can follow other word sequence because those patterns are entrenched into procedural memory.

we internalise the patterns of language the same way—what we call grammar is stored in procedural memory as a network of mental associations between chunks of words. this is why language feels instinctual, the words just arrive.