The role of language aptitude in learning L2 constructions from captioned and uncaptioned audiovisual input

This chapter discusses the effects of aptitude on learning L2 grammatical constructions from TV series with or without captions. Study 1 involved 69 Catalan/Spanish learners of English (EFL) who watched ten episodes of an English TV series, and targeted grammatical constructions learning. Study 2 comprised 30 Flemish learners of Spanish (ELE) who watched two excerpts from a Spanish TV series episode, with auditory grammaticality judgement pretest-posttest to assess their learning of subjunctive constructions. Grammatical sensitivity and inference aptitude was measured using LLAMA F in both studies. Results revealed that groups without captions relied more on aptitude to handle the demanding processing of fast-paced TV series. Successful processing of uncaptioned input appeared to require higher aptitude, whereas captions attenuated the effects of individual differences.