Abstract: 3 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. A widely held model of cognition endows human subjects with the ability to implicitly abstract the regularities or highlevel rules embodied in richly structured stimulus domains. Over the last 20 years, this general model has received strong empirical support in the field of artificial grammar learning from extensive work by Reber and his associates (e.g., Reber, 1967; Reber & Allen, 1978; Reber, Kassin, Lewis, & Cantor, 1980; see Reber, 1989, for a review). In a typical experiment, subjects first study a set of letter strings generated from a synthetic grammar that defines authorized letters and the permissible transitions between them. The grammar used by Reber and his associates in several experiments, which also served in Dulany, Carlson, and Dewey's (1984) and in our experiments, consisted of five letter consonants (M, R, T, X, V) and the set of transition rules shown in schematic form in Figure I. Some instances of letter strings that this grammar generates are MTTVRX, VXVT, or VXM. After studying some representative exemplars, subjects are asked to categorize new grammatical and nongrammatical letter strings. Nongrammatical items (e.g., MVRa'R) are formed from the same subset of letters, but they violate transition rules. Most subjects are able to perform this task with better-than-chance accuracy. This finding is interpreted as evidence of subjects' ability to
Publication Year: 1990
Publication Date: 1990-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 504
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