Synthetic grammar learning: Implicit rule abstraction or explicit fragmentary knowledge
Category
Journal Article
Authors
Perruchet, P., Pacteau, C.
Year
1990
Title
Synthetic grammar learning: Implicit rule abstraction or explicit fragmentary knowledge
Journal / book / conference
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
Abstract
Three experiments were designed to demonstrate that classifying new letter strings as grammatical (i.e., conforming to a set of rules called a synthetic grammar) or ungrammatical may proceed from fragmentary conscious knowledge of the bigrams constituting the grammatical strings displayed in the study phase, rather than from an unconscious structured representation of the grammar, as Reber (1989) contended.
In Experiment 1, grammaticality judgments of subjects initially studying grammatical letter strings did not differ from judgments by subjects learning from a list of the bigrams making up these strings. In Experiment 2, judgments about nongrammatical strings composed of valid bigrams placed in invalid locations were extremely poor, although better than chance. In Experiment 3 the explicit knowledge of bigrams as assessed by a recognition procedure appeared sufficient to account for observed performance on a standard test of grammaticality.
Issue
3
Volume
119
Pages
264-275