Indirect effects of synthetic grammar learning in an identification task.

Abstract

Two experiments investigated the effects of incidental learning of an artificial grammar on an indirect measure. Ss memorized consonant strings and later identified these in a perceptual clarification procedure. The competitive chunking model by E. Servan-Schreiber and J. R. Anderson (1990) predicted faster identifications of grammatical as opposed to nongrammatical strings. Both experiments confirmed this prediction. Experiment 2 further investigated whether faster identification induces a feeling of familiarity, which should increase the probability of subjects responding «grammatical» to a string