ABSTRACT
Implicit learning is thought to underlie language acquisition, acquisition of
reading and writing abilities and many other phenomena central to cognition.
The main finding in this field is that humans exposed to the stimulus material,
which comprises some regularities, unintentionally acquire an ability to
discriminate between stimuli with and without these regularities. Moreover,
when these regularities are instantiated with a symbol set different from the
training one participants still succeed in the task (so-called transfer effect,
Reber, 1967). ! hypothesized an existence of one general mechanism capable of explaining both the discrimination and the transfer phenomenon. This
mechanism is sensitive to the existence of a symbol repetition pattern in a
stimulus string. ! called such a repetition an abstract pattern (AP) since a fact of symbol repetition is instantiation independent. Two experiments were
conducted in order to check whether participants base their grammaticality
judgment on the fact of presence of AP in the test material during implicit
learning of artificial grammar (AG). ! found a tendency to recognize as grammatical, items with an arbitrary AP rather than those without any AP and
items with an AP seen during training rather then those with an unseen AP. A
computer simulation in the form of a three layer autoassociator was run and
found useful for explaining participants’ overall performance as well as their
responses to the particular stimuli.
