Analogic and abstraction strategies in synthetic grammar learning: A functionalist interpretation

Reber, Arthur S.; Allen, Rhianon

doi:10.1016/0010-0277(78)90013-6

Cited by 277 publications

(355 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Instructions for the look learning condition asked participants to look at each string while it was on the computer screen. This was intended to create a learning context that was more truly incidental than the usual practice of requiring participants to memorize the letter strings (see Reber & Allen, 1978). Instructions for the rules-search learning condition made participants aware that a complex set of rules dictated which letters could follow which other letters within the strings and requested that they attempt to discern the rules.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The conscious, the unconscious, and familiarity.

Scott

Dienes

2008

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

109

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This article examines the role of subjective familiarity in the implicit and explicit learning of artificial grammars. Experiment 1 found that objective measures of similarity (including fragment frequency and repetition structure) predicted ratings of familiarity, that familiarity ratings predicted grammaticality judgments, and that the extremity of familiarity ratings predicted confidence. Familiarity was further shown to predict judgments in the absence of confidence, hence contributing to above-chance guessing. Experiment 2 found that confidence developed as participants refined their knowledge of the distribution of familiarity and that differences in familiarity could be exploited prior to confidence developing. Experiment 3 found that familiarity was consciously exploited to make grammaticality judgments including those made without confidence and that familiarity could in some instances influence participants' grammaticality judgments apparently without their awareness. All 3 experiments found that knowledge distinct from familiarity was derived only under deliberate learning conditions. The results provide decisive evidence that familiarity is the essential source of knowledge in artificial grammar learning while also supporting a dual-process model of implicit and explicit learning.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The conscious, the unconscious, and familiarity.

Scott

Dienes

2008

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

109

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“…Arguably, there might be a case for using other measures of performance (e.g., from detection theory), but the advantage of using grammaticality accuracy is that it enhances comparability with previous research. Reber and Allen (1978) viewed grammaticality accuracy as a measure of rule learning. Since their investigation, however, there have been several demonstrations that grammaticality accuracy with their materials may covary with other kinds of knowledge, such as knowledge of string fragments (Perruchet & Pacteau, 1990) or similarity (Vokey & Brooks, 1992).…”

Section: Methodological Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Stimulus Appearance Affect Learning?

Pothos¹,

Chater²,

Ziori³

2006

The American Journal of Psychology

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We examined the learning process with 3 sets of stimuli that have identical symbolic structure but differ in appearance (meaningless letter strings, arrangements of geometric shapes, and sequences of cities). One hypothesis is that the learning process aims to encode symbolic regularity in the same way, largely regardless of appearance. Another is that different types of stimuli bias the learning process to operate in different ways. Using the experimental paradigm of artificial grammar learning, we provided a preliminary test of these hypotheses. In Experiments 1 and 2 we measured performance in terms of grammaticality and found no difference across the 3 sets of stimuli. In Experiment 3 we analyzed performance in terms of both grammaticality and chunk strength. Again we found no differences in performance. Our tentative conclusion is that the learning process aims to encode symbolic regularity independent of stimulus appearance.

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“…Stimulus generation was based on a deterministic version of Reber and Allen's (1978) classic grammar. Stimuli had a length between three and seven city names.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To create the distance factor, we first created a similarity matrix for all the symbols of the grammar (for brevity, we represent these as in the original Reber & Allen, 1978, study, as M, S, R, V, and X). To do so, we computed the frequency of bigrams in training items (Table 1) and the matrix entries corresponded to this information.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In a typical AGL experiment (e.g., Dulany, Carlson & Dewey, 1984;Reber, 1967;Reber & Allen, 1978), participants first study a list of letter strings generated by a finite state grammar and are asked to simply observe them or memorize them. After training, they are informed that the strings followed a complex set of rules, but no specific information is provided regarding the nature of the rules.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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