CC participants were significantly more sensitive to the adverbs than verb morphology. Chinese native speakers (no L1 verb-tense morphology) viewed Latin utterances combining lexical and morphological cues to temporality under control conditions (CCs) and three types of explicit FFI: verb grammar instruction (VG), verb salience with textual enhancement (VS), and verb pretraining (VP), and their use of these cues was assessed in a subsequent comprehension test. Experiment 1 used eye-tracking to investigate how language background influences learners’ attention to morphological cues, as well as the attentional processes whereby different types of FFI overcome low cue salience, learned attention and blocking. (3) The low salience of morphosyntactic cues can be overcome by FFI, which leads learners to attend cues which might otherwise be ignored. (2) Learned attention is an associative learning phenomenon where prior-learned cues block those that are experienced later. (1) When presented with competing cues to interpretation, learners are more likely to attend to physically more salient cues in the input. We consider the role of physical form, prior experience, and form focused instruction (FFI) in adult language learning. 3English Language Institute, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.2Department of Linguistics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.1Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
