Marescaux, P. 1, 2 & ROUJON, D. 1, 2
1 LAPSCO - CNRS UMR 6024
2 Université Blaise Pascal - Clermont Ferrand - France
Implicit learning was early described as the acquisition of abstract knowledge about rule-governed environments that takes place largely in the absence of explicit knowledge about what was acquired. Although it was further acknowledged that this rendition constituted an oversimplification, few studies have tried to analyze verbal reports and their relation to actual performance. Two experiments on artificial grammar learning were devoted to this issue. In Experiment 1, participants having been exposed to strings generated by an artificial grammar took a grammaticality judgment test in which they were immediately asked to explain each decision they made. Verbal reports contained mainly justifications in terms of admissible/inadmissible bigrams or trigrams with additional information about their position sometimes. A computed verbal performance measure positively correlated with performance on the grammaticality test. In Experiment 2, verbal reports from each original trained participant were summarized on a sheet delivered to a yoked participant who achieved the grammaticality test without prior exposure to the grammar. Performances of original and yoked participants on the grammaticality test were indistinguishable. Overall, the findings suggest that when full opportunities are given for explicit knowledge to emerge, implicitly acquired knowledge may be wholly elicited.