Synthetic Grammar Learning: Implicit Rule Abstraction or Explicit Fragmentary Knowledge?

3 experiments were designed to demonstrate that classifying new letter strings as grammatical (i.e., conforming to a set of rules called a synthetic grammar) or ungrammatical may proceed from fragmentary conscious knowledge of the bigrams constituting the grammatical strings displayed in the study phase, rather than from an unconscious structured representation of the grammar, as Reber (1989) contended. In Experiment 1, grammaticality judgments of subjects initially studying grammatical letter strings did not differ from judgments by subjects learning from a list of the bigrams making up these strings. In Experiment 2, judgments about nongrammatical strings composed of valid bigrams placed in invalid locations were extremely poor, although better than chance. In Experiment 3 the explicit knowledge of bigrams as assessed by a recognition procedure appeared sufficient to account for observed performance on a standard test of grammaticality.