This study examined two possible bases for grammatical judgments following syntactical learning: unconscious representations of a formal grammar, as in Reber's (1976) hypothesis of implicit learning, and conscious rules within informal grammars. Experimental subjects inspected strings generated by a finite-state grammar, viewed either one at a time or all at a time, with implicit or explicit learning instructions. In a transfer test, experimental and control subjects judged the grammatically of grammatical and nongrammatical strings, reporting on every trial the bases for their judgments. In replication of others' results, experimental subjects met the critical test for grammatical abstraction: significantly correct classification of novel strings. We found, however, that reported rules predicted those grammatical judgments without significant residual. Subjects evidently acquired correlated grammars, personal sets of conscious rules, each of limited scope and many of imperfect validity. Those rules themselves were shown to embody abstractions, consciously represented novelty that could account for abstraction embodied in judgments. The better explanation of these results, we argue, credits grammatical judgments to conscious rules within informal grammars rather than to unconscious representations of a formal grammar.

It began innocently enough. But the hterature of verbal operant conditiomng (Krasner, 1958, Salzmger, 1959, Adams, 1957 has raised some uncommonly weighty problems-^the expenmental and theoretical status of awareness, the status of the subject's pnvate reports m a leammg or conditionmg expenment, the question of conscious, voluntary as agamst automatic, mvoluntary control, and the generahty of pnnciples and procedures from the prelmguistic to the human level These problems are raised mainly because the case for operant conditiomng without awareness IS so contestable And that, ironically, comes m part from a rather stramed fidebty to operant conditionmg procedures.Conditiomng is often claimed for significant shifts from an operant level m the absence of controls, although we can a little less confidently rule out other time-correlated controls for speaking than for peckmg And questiomng typically must await an extmction procedure, a procedure excellently suited to the disconfirmation of any hypotheses the subject may have had Nor, for that matter, do we know what extmction should mean for this kmd of acquisition Should we think of verbal conditionmg as a momentary change m response rate associated with a contmgent stmiulus, or as a fairly endurmg change m availability of response*^ As It is, if rate of response declmes dunng extmction, this may be taken as further evidence that conditionmg has occurred If It doesn't, this of course just shows how strong the conditioning was Furthermore, as Adams (1957), Krasner (1958), and Eriksen (1960 have observed, the questions asked often

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In this article we examine Reber, Allen, and Regan's (1985) commentary on our analysis of consciousness and abstraction in a case of syntactical learning and judgment (Dulany, Carlson, & Dewey, 1984). We reject their methodological criticism; it is not recall, but assessment at the moment of judgment, that maximizes the validity of reports of rules in consciousness at many moments of judgment. Furthermore, as our computer simulations show, if subjects' reports were merely guessed justifications of unconsciously controlled judgments, the obtained relation of rules to judgments is an event so deviant as to be expected about once in 10 billion occasions. In addition, we discuss a number of broader issues raised by our analysis and their response: judgment after early learning and after automatization, correlated grammars and consciousness, the scope and mental abstractness of rules, conscious and unconscious control, and intuition. Although Reber et al. raise questions that should be examined, we find no reason to revise the interpretation of our experiment.

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