1 Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2014, page 1 of 23. doi:10.1017/S0272263114000333 © Cambridge University Press 2014 CROSSLINGUISTIC DIFFERENCES IN IMPLICIT LANGUAGE LEARNING Janny H. C. Leung The University of Hong Kong John N. Williams University of Cambridge We report three experiments that explore the effect of prior linguistic knowledge on implicit language learning. Native speakers of English from the United Kingdom and native speakers of Cantonese from Hong Kong participated in experiments that involved different learning materials. In Experiment 1, both participant groups showed evidence of learning a mapping between articles and noun animacy. In Exper- iment 2, neither group showed learning of a mapping between arti- cles and a linguistically anomalous concept (the number of capital letters in an English word or that of strokes in a Chinese character). In Experiment 3, the Chinese group, but not the English group, showed evidence of learning a mapping between articles and a concept derived from the Chinese classifier system. It was concluded that first language knowledge affected implicit language learning and that implicit learning, at least when natural language learning is concerned, is subject to constraints and biases. Traditional research into implicit learning, the phenomenon of learning without awareness (Shanks & St. John, 1994; Williams 2005, 2009), as contrasted with explicit learning, has sought to minimize the effect of This project (code RES-000-22-3030) has been generously supported by a joint research scheme under the Research Grants Council, Hong Kong, and the Economic and Social Research Council, United Kingdom. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Janny Leung, School of English, CRT735, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong. E-mail: jannyleung@hku.hk