Applied Psycholinguistics 33 (2012), 829–856

doi:10.1017/S0142716411000580

Implicit and explicit knowledge

in second language acquisition
PATRICK REBUSCHAT
University of Cambridge and Georgetown University

JOHN N. WILLIAMS
University of Cambridge

Received: September 17, 2009 Accepted for publication: March 14, 2011

ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE

Patrick Rebuschat, Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University, 37th and O Streets, NW,
Washington, DC 20057. E-mail: per6@[Link]

ABSTRACT
Language development is frequently characterized as a process where learning proceeds implicitly,
that is, incidentally and in absence of awareness of what was learned. This article reports the results
of two experiments that investigated whether second language acquisition can also result in implicit
knowledge. Adult learners were trained on an artificial language under incidental learning conditions
and then tested by means of grammaticality judgments and subjective measures of awareness. The
results indicate that incidental exposure to second language syntax can result in unconscious knowledge,
which suggests that at least some of the learning in this experiment was implicit. At the same time,
however, it was also found that conscious (but unverbalizable) knowledge was clearly linked to
improved performance in the grammaticality judgment task.

The process of implicit learning, essentially the ability to acquire unconscious

knowledge, is an elementary and ubiquitous process of human cognition (for
overviews, see Cleeremans, Destrebecqz, & Boyer, 1998; Perruchet, 2008; Reber,
1993; Shanks, 2005).1 Many essential skills, including language comprehension
and production, social interaction, music perception, and intuitive decision mak-
ing, are largely dependent on implicit knowledge (Berry & Dienes, 1993; Reber,
1993). The term implicit learning was first employed by Arthur Reber (1967) to
describe a process during which subjects derive knowledge from a complex, rule-
governed stimulus domain without intending to and without becoming aware of
the knowledge they have acquired.2 The term explicit learning is usually applied
to learning scenarios in which subjects are instructed to actively look for patterns,
that is, learning is intentional, a process that tends to result conscious knowledge.
The field of second language acquisition (SLA) has a long-standing interest in
implicit and explicit learning (see, e.g., the contributions in Ellis, 1994; Hulstijn &
Ellis, 2005; Rebuschat, in press-b). To a large degree, this interest was sparked
by Krashen’s (1981) proposal that learners possess two independent ways of
© Cambridge University Press 2011 0142-7164/11 $15.00
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developing knowledge of a second language (L2). According to Krashen (1981),

language acquisition is an incidental process that results in tacit linguistic knowl-
edge, whereas language learning is an intentional process that results in conscious,
metalinguistic knowledge. In online speech comprehension and production, learn-
ers are thought to rely exclusively on acquired (or implicit) knowledge. The role
of learnt (or explicit) knowledge is to monitor utterances for mistakes. Of im-
portance, Krashen claimed that there is no interface between explicit and implicit
knowledge. For example, explicit knowledge of a rule does not help the implicit
acquisition of the same rule. For these reasons, Krashen (1981) argued that L2
teaching should focus on creating the conditions for language acquisition to take
place.
Krashen’s (1981) proposals and their pedagogical implications generated con-
siderable controversy (for discussion, see Ellis, 2008). But they were also partially
responsible for the increasing interest in implicit and explicit processes in L2
acquisition and use. Many studies have focused on the role of explicit knowledge
(e.g., Fotos, 1993; Han & Ellis, 1998). Other studies have compared implicit and
explicit learning more directly, frequently with the objective of determining the
effectiveness of different instructional treatments (e.g., Alanen, 1995; de Graaff,
1997; for meta-analyses, see Norris & Ortega, 2000; Spada & Tomita, 2010).
Robinson (1995), for example, compared the SLA of English syntax under dif-
ferent exposure conditions. Subjects in the implicit condition and in the incidental
condition were exposed to the L2 rules incidentally, that is, subjects were unaware
that they were receiving training and that they would be tested afterward. The
difference between the two conditions is that subjects in the former group were
required to focus on the ordering of words in stimulus sentences, whereas subjects
in the latter group were asked comprehension questions and thus focused on the
meaning of the stimuli. Subjects in the rule-search condition were instructed
to discover the L2 rules while receiving exposure to the training set, whereas
subjects in the instructed condition received formal explanations of the rules in
addition to rule-oriented training. At test, subjects in all conditions completed a
grammaticality judgment task. Classification performance served as a measure of
learning. Retrospective verbal reports were used to determine whether the acquired
knowledge was conscious or not. Robinson (1995) found that, in terms of overall
accuracy, the instructed group scored highest, followed by the incidental group,
the rule-search group, and the implicit group. Of importance, the analyses of the
verbal reports showed that large numbers of subjects in all conditions noticed
rules during training and were able to report them when prompted to do so. That
is, Robinson’s study showed that subjects can acquire L2 syntax incidentally (as
evidenced by the performance of subjects in the implicit and incidental groups)
but provided no evidence that exposure resulted in unconscious knowledge.3
The observation that adult learners can acquire nonnative syntax without intend-
ing to is supported by several studies (e.g., Cleary & Langley, 2007; Rebuschat,
2008; Rebuschat & Williams, 2006, 2009; Robinson, 2005; Williams & Kuribara,
2008). Robinson’s (2005) study, for example, includes a group of subjects that
were trained on L2 syntactic rules under incidental learning conditions. Adult
native speakers of Japanese were asked to memorize the meanings of a number of
Samoan words and then visually presented with a total of 450 Samoan sentences.
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Subjects in this group received no formal instruction of the target. The training
phase required subjects to understand the meaning of each stimulus sentence
and to answer a comprehension question. Learning was assessed by means of two
grammaticality judgment tasks and a guided sentence production task. No measure
of awareness was included. Robinson (2005) found a clear learning effect (63.8%
accuracy), confirming that adult learners can acquire L2 syntactic knowledge
incidentally and while processing sentences for meaning. However, because the
study did not include measures of awareness, it is not clear whether learning in
the incidental group resulted in unconscious knowledge.
More recently, Williams and Kuribara (2008) investigated the acquisition of
L2 Japanese word order rules (head direction and scrambling) under inciden-
tal learning conditions. A semiartificial language consisting of English words
and Japanese syntax (Japlish) was used to generate the stimulus sequences. The
training set, for example, included sentences such as Student-ga dog-ni what-o
offered?, Vet-ga injection-o gave, and That sandwich-o John-ga ate. Experimental
subjects were exposed to a wide variety of sentence types by means of a plausibility
judgment task. During training, subjects had to judge whether the statements made
were semantically plausible or not. At test, learning was assessed by means of
a grammaticality judgment task. Williams and Kuribara found that experimental
subjects outperformed controls on the classification task, suggesting that the train-
ing phase produced a learning effect. No measures of awareness were included in
the experimental design, so it is unclear if subjects were unaware of the knowledge
they have acquired.
Cleary and Langley (2007) focused on the retention of syntactic patterns as
a result of incidental exposure. Adult subjects were presented with meaningless
word sequences that followed the same syntactic pattern (e.g., BEAUTIFUL TRANS-
PORTATION SHED TEMPORARY PLANTS, MECHANICAL CONSUMERS SUBMIT COLDER
SONGS, and EFFICIENT DREAMS WRITE BETTER UMBRELLAS). After exposure, sub-
jects were given a recognition task that required them to rate the likelihood that
each test item was present in the previous part of the experiment. The testing set in-
cludes three types of sequences: studied strings (repetitions from training), critical
lures (novel sequences that followed the same pattern as the studied strings), and
new strings (new sequences that did not follow the pattern of the studied strings).
Cleary and Langley (2007) found, as expected, that subjects rated studied strings
highest and new strings lowest. It is interesting, however, that they also found that
ratings were significantly higher for critical lures than for new strings. In other
words, if a novel word sequence followed the same syntactic pattern as the training
sequences, subjects were more likely to think that they had encountered it before,
even if this was not actually the case. Cleary and Langley (2007) suggest that this
ratings effects occurs because subjects derived an abstract representation of the
syntactic structure underlying the training sentences. That is, incidental exposure
to new word patterns results in knowledge that is, at least partially, independent
of the items utilized in training.
Preliminary evidence that the acquisition of nonnative syntax can occur not
just without intention but also result in unconscious knowledge was provided
by Francis, Schmidt, Carr, and Clegg (2009). Francis et al. (2009) investigated
the incidental learning of basic word order patterns by adult native speakers of
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English. Subjects initially performed on an oral reading task, during which they
were exposed predominantly to one type of three-word sequences, depending
on which group they had been assigned to. One group was exposed mostly to
noun–noun–verb strings (say, STEAK COP LEARNED), whereas the other group was
exposed mainly to verb–noun–noun strings (PIERCED JANE OIL). Both of these
sequence types are “nondominant” in that they do not occur in English. The
arrangement of the words was random, that is, no meaningful utterances were
used. Subjects were presented with three-word strings and instructed to read the
three words out loud. Oral reading time for each sequence was used an indirect
measure of learning. The first phase of the reading task (eight learning blocks)
served to expose subjects to exemplars of the nondominant word order. The
second phase (one testing block) was used to assess whether subject groups had
acquired knowledge about their respective training sequences and whether this
knowledge could be generalized to novel sequences with the same underlying
structure. Francis et al. (2009) found that reading speed decreased as a result of
exposure and that this pattern held for strings encountered during the learning
blocks as well as for strings that followed the nondominant word order but had
not been presented before. Their study confirms that adults can acquire new word
order patterns incidentally, and that the exposure resulted in abstract, generalizable
representations. It is interesting that Francis et al. (2009) also report that only few
subjects were able to generate strings that followed the training pattern when
prompted to do so in a grammar generation task. This suggests that the incidental
exposure resulted, at least in some participants, in unconscious knowledge.
In sum, a review of the literature shows that adult subjects are able to acquire
the syntactic structure of a novel language without intending to and that incidental
exposure can result in abstract representations. In addition, there is also some
indication that incidental exposure might result in unconscious knowledge of
basic word order patterns (Francis et al., 2009). However, it is yet unclear whether
there is implicit learning of L2 syntax, that is, whether incidental exposure to
natural language sequences can result in unconscious knowledge.

MEASURING IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT KNOWLEDGE

Despite the considerable interest in the topic of implicit and explicit learning
within the field of SLA, we know surprisingly little about the role that implicit
learning plays in SLA. This is, in part, due to methodological reasons (Williams,
2009). Although there are several theories about the role of implicit and explicit
L2 learning (e.g., Ellis, 2007; Krashen, 1981) it is difficult to adjudicate between
them because of the difficulty of determining whether exposure resulted primarily
in implicit or in explicit knowledge. If we intend to characterize the contribution
of implicit learning to SLA, we need to be able to measure whether the acquired
knowledge is implicit or explicit.
In psychology, the most commonly used criterion for disentangling these types
of knowledge is awareness (or lack thereof). Implicit knowledge is unconscious
knowledge that subjects are generally not aware of possessing. Explicit knowledge
is conscious knowledge that subjects will be aware of possessing, although they
might still not be able to verbalize it. There are several ways of measuring whether
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or not the acquired knowledge is conscious or unconscious (for an overview, see

Rebuschat, in press-a).

Verbal reports
One of the most common procedures for assessing whether subjects have acquired
implicit or explicit knowledge is to prompt them to verbalize any rules they
might have noticed while performing on the experimental tasks. This is generally
done during the debriefing session, that is, these are retrospective reports (for
the use of concurrent reports to assess awareness at the time of encoding, see
Leow, 2000; Leow & Bowles, 2005). Knowledge is considered to be unconscious
when subjects show an effect of training (e.g., above-chance performance on a
grammaticality judgment task), despite being unable to describe the knowledge
that underlies their performance. Several studies have provided evidence for a
dissociation between task performance and verbalizable knowledge (e.g., Leung,
2007; Reber, 1967; Rebuschat, 2008; Rebuschat & Williams, 2006; Williams,
2005), and there is little doubt that exposure can result in unconscious knowledge
if lack of verbalization is used as a criterion for implicitness. However, the view that
knowledge is unconscious when subjects fail to verbalize the knowledge they have
acquired has been criticized. First, verbal reports constitute a relatively insensitive
and incomplete measure of awareness, given that it is possible to be aware of
something without being able to verbally express this knowledge (Shanks & St.
John, 1994: sensitivity criterion). Second, it is unclear whether the information
assessed by verbal reports is responsible for the performance on the measure of
learning (Shanks & St. John, 1994: information criterion).

Subjective measures
Dienes (2004, 2008) has advocated the use of subjective measures in order to assess
whether the knowledge acquired during artificial grammar learning (AGL) tasks
is conscious or unconscious. One way of dissociating conscious and unconscious
knowledge is to collect confidence ratings and source attributions (e.g., Dienes &
Scott, 2005). This can be done, for example, by asking subjects to perform on a
grammaticality judgment task and to indicate, for each judgment, how confident
they were in their decision (e.g., guess, somewhat confident, very confident) and
what their decision was based on (e.g., guess, intuition, memory, rule knowledge).
Knowledge can be considered unconscious if subjects believe to be guessing when
their classification performance is significantly above chance. Dienes, Altmann,
Kwan, and Goode (1995) called this the guessing criterion. Knowledge is also
unconscious if subjects’ confidence is unrelated to their accuracy. This criterion,
introduced by Chan (1992), was labeled zero correlation criterion by Dienes
et al. (1995).
Dienes (2004) suggested that, when subjects are exposed to letter sequences
in an AGL experiment, they learn about the structure of the sequences. This
structural knowledge can consist, for example, of knowledge of whole exemplars,
knowledge of fragments or knowledge of rules (e.g., A letter sequence can start
with an M or a V). In the testing phase, subjects use their structural knowledge
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to construct a different type of knowledge, namely, whether the test items shared
the same underlying structure as the training items (e.g., MRVXX has the same
structure as the training sequences). Dienes labeled this judgment knowledge.
Both forms of knowledge can be conscious or unconscious. For example, a struc-
tural representation such as An R can be repeated several times is only conscious
if it is explicitly represented, that is, if there is a higher order thought such as I
know/think/believe that an R can repeated several times (Rosenthal, 2005). Like-
wise, judgment knowledge is only conscious if there is a corresponding higher
order thought (e.g., I know/think/believe that MRVXX has the same structure as
the training sequences).
Dienes and Scott (2005) assume that conscious structural knowledge leads to
conscious judgment knowledge. However, if structural knowledge is unconscious,
judgment knowledge could still be either conscious or unconscious. This explains
why, in the case of natural language, people can be very confident in their gram-
maticality decisions without knowing why. Here, structural (linguistic) knowledge
is unconscious, whereas (metalinguistic) judgment knowledge is conscious. The
phenomenology in this case is that of intuition, that is, knowing that a judgment is
correct but not knowing why. In contrast, if structural and judgment knowledge are
unconscious, the phenomenology is that of guessing. In both cases the structural
knowledge acquired during training is unconscious. The experiments below exem-
plify how subjective measures can be employed to investigate whether incidental
exposure to a new syntactic system can result in unconscious knowledge in adult
learners (see also Hamrick & Rebuschat, in press; Tagarelli, Borges Mota, &
Rebuschat, 2011).
In sum, the case for implicit learning depends on our criterion of implicitness and
the method employed to detect the conscious or unconscious status of knowledge.
If retrospective verbal reports are taken as a measure of awareness, there is little
doubt that learning can result in unconscious knowledge. As has been pointed
out, however, the use of verbal reports is controversial as subjects might fail to
report for reasons that are unrelated to the potentially unconscious state of their
knowledge. The observation of a subjective threshold by means of confidence
ratings or source attributions represents an alternative approach to conceptualizing
and measuring awareness. If lack of awareness is taken as performance below the
subjective threshold, there is general agreement about the existence of unconscious
cognitive processes operating in perception (e.g., Erdelyi, 2004; Greenwald, 1992;
Kihlstrom, 1987; Merikle & Daneman, 2000) and in AGL (e.g., Dienes et al.,
1995; Dienes & Scott, 2005). Yet, it remains to be established whether incidental
exposure to a new linguistic system can result in implicit knowledge.

THE PRESENT STUDY

The present study had two objectives. The first was to determine whether adult
learners can acquire L2 syntax implicitly, that is, without intending to and without
becoming aware of the knowledge they have acquired. As discussed above, there
is little doubt that adults can inquire syntactic knowledge of a new language inci-
dentally. However, it is unclear whether incidental learning results in unconscious
knowledge. Robinson (1995) found that subjects were able to verbally describe
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the rule system, which suggests that learning was incidental but not implicit.
The findings of Francis et al. (2009) suggest that adults might acquire implicit
syntactic knowledge, but their study focused on the retention of relatively simple,
meaningless three-word sequences (e.g., STEAK COP LEARNED). It thus remains to
be determined whether there is implicit learning of syntax when the target system
resembles the grammar of a natural language more closely.
The second objective was to establish whether adult learners can acquire L2
syntax incidentally as a result of auditory exposure in a meaning-oriented task.
The incidental learning studies reviewed above all involved visual presentation
of the stimulus sentences (audiovisual in Williams & Kuribara, 2008). Given
that language acquisition generally proceeds as a result of exposure to auditory
sequences, it is yet unclear whether adult learners can acquire L2 syntax without
recourse to visual stimulus presentation.
In terms of methodology, the two experiments described below are based on
the AGL paradigm. An artificial system was chosen to generate the stimulus
material in order to ensure that the stimuli were novel to participants. In contrast
to traditional AGL studies, however, the experiments were adapted to investigate
the acquisition of natural language syntax. First, the target system employed here
follows the word-order rules of a natural language (German). Second, instead of
relying on a lexicon that consists of meaningless units (letters, tones, nonsense
words, etc.), the lexicon in the following experiments consists of English words.
Both features, the use of a natural language grammar and the use of meaningful
lexical units, increased the similarity of the artificial system to natural languages
and the generalizability of the findings to language acquisition outside the lab.
Finally, the experiments integrate several measures of awareness, namely verbal
reports, confidence ratings and source judgments.

EXPERIMENT 1
Method
Participants. Thirty-five native speakers of English (22 women, 13 men, Mage =
24.3 years) were recruited to take part in this experiment and distributed into ex-
perimental (n = 20) and control (n = 15) conditions. No subject had a background
in German or any other V2 language. Experimental and control groups did not
differ significantly across age, gender, occupation (student vs. nonstudent), and
number of languages acquired (all p > .05). Subjects received £5 for participating
in the experiment.

Stimulus material. A semiartificial language, consisting of English words and

German syntax, was used to generate the stimulus material for this experiment
(Rebuschat, 2008; Rebuschat & Williams, 2006). In creating the stimuli, English
declarative sentences were rearranged in accordance with German syntax as in the
examples below (1–4). In comparison to the artificial systems commonly employed
in AGL research, this system has the advantage that the grammatical complexity
of natural languages is maintained and semantic information is present.
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(1) Simple sentence (one-clause construction; simple predicate)

a. English: Yesterday John bought the newspaper in the supermarket.
b. German: Gestern kaufte John die Zeitung im Supermarkt.
c. Stimulus: Yesterday bought John the newspaper in the supermarket.
(2) Simple sentence (one-clause construction; complex predicate)
a. English: Yesterday John has bought the newspaper in the supermarket.
b. German: Gestern hat John die Zeitung im Supermarkt gekauft.
c. Stimulus: Yesterday has John the newspaper in the supermarket bought.
(3) Complex sentence (two-clause construction; sequence: main–subordinate)
a. English: Last year Susan visited Melbourne because her daughter studied in
Australia.
b. German: Letzte Jahr besuchte Susan Melbourne, weil ihre Tochter in Australien
studierte.
c. Stimulus: Last year visited Susan Melbourne because her daughter in Australia
studied.
(4) Complex sentence (two-clause construction; sequence: subordinate–main)
a. English: Since his parents needed groceries, David purchased everything necessary.
b. German: Weil seine Eltern Lebensmittel brauchten, kaufte David alles Notwendige
ein.
c. Stimulus: Since his parents groceries needed, purchased David everything necessary.

As is evident from the examples, the elements within phrase boundaries were left
intact, whereas the specific ordering of the phrases was altered. In (1), for example,
the verb phrase (VP) was moved from third position in the phrasal sequence to
second. In (2), the auxiliary was placed in second position, whereas the participle
was moved to the end of the sentence. In (3), the VP of the main clause was
moved to second position, whereas the VP of the subordinate clause was placed in
final position. Finally, in (4) the VP of the subordinate clause was moved to final
position, whereas the VP of the main clause was shifted to first position.
The linguistic focus in this experiment was on four rules that determine the
placement of VPs in the semiartificial language. The verb placement rules in this
experiment were based on German syntax and stated that, depending on the type
of predicate (simple vs. complex), the type of clause (main vs. subordinate) and
the type of clause sequence (main–subordinate vs. subordinate–main), finite verbs
had to be placed either in first (V1), second (V2), or final position (VF) in terms
of the phrasal sequence. Table 1 illustrates the four rules in question.
Rules V2 and split VP applied to main clauses that were not preceded by
a subordinate clause. They differed in that the former rule applied to simple
predicates and the latter rule to complex predicates. In the semiartificial language,
simple predicates occurred both in simple and in complex sentences; complex
predicates only occurred in simple sentences. Rule V1 also applied to main clauses
but only to those that were preceded by a subordinate clause. In contrast, rule VF
applied to all subordinate clauses, irrespectively of whether a main clause preceded
or followed.
A total of 192 sentences were drafted for this experiment. The sentences were
read out by a male native speaker of English, digitally recorded on a Sony Mini-
Disc player (MZ-R700) and subsequently edited with sound processing software
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Table 1. Descriptions and examples of the four verb placement rules

Rule Description Examples

V2 Finite verb placed in second phrasal Today bought John the newspaper
position of main clauses that are not in the supermarket.
preceded by a subordinate clause
Split VP For complex predicates in main Today has John the newspaper in
clauses that are not preceded by a the supermarket bought.
subordinate clause: auxiliary placed
in second position, participle placed
in final position
V1 Finite verb placed in first position in Because his parents the newspaper
main clauses that are preceded by a in the supermarket bought, spent
subordinate clause John the evening in his study.
VF Finite verb placed in final position in Peter repeated today that the
all subordinate clauses movers his furniture scratched.

Note: V, verb; VP, verb phrase.

(Audacity, version 1.2.4). The stimulus sentences were divided into a training and
a testing set.
TRAINING SET. The training set consisted of 128 sentences and was subdivided
into 64 plausible and 64 implausible constructions. In other words, half the sen-
tences in the training set were syntactically correct but expressed semantically
implausible propositions. Plausible and implausible items were designed so that
participants would have to process the entire auditory string before being able to
judge its plausibility. In most instances, the final part of the sentence would reveal
whether the sentence was plausible or not, and participants had to process the
entire string until reaching their judgment. The sentences below are examples of
plausible and implausible constructions (5–6).

(5) Plausible constructions

a. Chris entertained today his colleagues with an interesting performance. [V2]
b. Brian has usually many shots during his matches defended. [V2VF]
c. George repeated today that his students about their classes cared. [V2–VF]
d. Since his teacher criticism voiced, put Chris more effort into his homework. [VF–V1]
(6) Implausible constructions
a. ? Rose abandoned in the evening her cats on planet Venus. [V2]
b. ? Sarah has usually in the afternoon a soup e-mailed. [V2VF]
c. ? Cate confessed today that her horse the corridor murdered. [V2–VF]
d. ? After his wife a thief surprised, communicated George with the police banana.
[VF–V1]

In order to train the experimental group, 32 sentences were created for each
verb placement rule. There were thus four grammatical training patterns, namely,
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Table 2. Grammatical and ungrammatical patterns used in the testing set

Pattern Grammatical

V2 Yesterday scribbled David a long letter to his family.

V2VF Recently have his parents an accountant consulted.
V2–VF Paul argued recently that the chairman the wrong figures displayed.
VF–V1 Because his children fairy tales loved, invented John many stories.

Ungrammatical

*VF Recently Jim the Boston Marathon in four hours ran.

*V3VF Yesterday the guitar was by David smashed.
*V2–V1 Recently maintained David that abstained his father from unhealthy food.
*VF–VF Because his son an instrument wanted, David with the music teacher talked.

Note: The sentences are examples taken from the testing set. V, verb; VF, verb final.

V2, V2VF, V2–VF, and VF–V1, all of which occurred with equal frequency. All
sentences were in the past tense.

TESTING SET. The testing set consisted of 64 new sentences and was subdivided
into 32 grammatical and 32 ungrammatical items. The grammatical sentences
followed the same syntactic patterns as the training sentences (V2, V2VF, V2–VF,
VF–V1). The ungrammatical patterns were similar to the grammatical ones with
the exception that the position of the VP was incorrect (∗ VF, ∗ V3VF, ∗ V2–V1,
∗
VF–VF). Table 2 lists the syntactic patterns of the testing set.
With the exception of a limited number of function words, no words were
repeated from the training set, making the test analogous to the transfer paradigm
in AGL research (Reber, 1969). A frequency analysis of the testing set indicated
that the average stimulus length was 8.8 words per sentence for grammatical items
and 9.1 for ungrammatical items. There was no significant difference between
training and testing sets with regard to sentence length, t (31) = 0.911, p > .05,
which suggests that length could not serve as a reliable cue to grammaticality in
the testing phase.

Procedure.

TRAINING PHASE. Experimental participants were exposed on the semiartificial

language under incidental learning conditions by means of plausibility judgments.
Specifically, the training task required participants to listen to the training set on
an item by item basis and to judge whether the statement made was semantically
plausible or not. The experiment began with a short practice session to familiarize
participants with the training task. This consisted of four practice sentences that
were not repeated in the actual training phase. No mention was made that the
scrambling followed the word order rules of a natural language. The training
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sentences were presented to each participant in random order. The entire training
phase took, on average, 30 min to complete. Controls were not exposed to the
artificial system.

TESTING PHASE. After training, experimental participants were informed that

the word order in the previous sentences was not arbitrary but that it followed a
“complex system” instead. They were then instructed to listen to 64 new scrambled
sentences, only half of which would follow the same rule system as the sequences
they had just been exposed to. Those sentences that did obey the rules should
be endorsed as grammatical and those that did not rejected as ungrammatical.
For each test sentence, participants were required to decide on its grammaticality
and to report how confident they were in their judgment on a binary scale (low
vs. high confidence). Accuracy in the grammaticality judgment task was used as
a measure of learning. The binary confidence ratings were collected in order to
assess the conscious or unconscious status of participants’ metaknowledge. In the
case of the control group, participants were merely told that they would listen
to 64 scrambled sentences and asked to judge whether or not a sentence was
grammatical.
The test sentences were presented to each participant in random order. The
testing phase began with a short practice session to familiarize the participants
with the new task. This consisted of four trials that were not repeated in the actual
testing set. Participants were given no feedback regarding the accuracy of their
grammaticality decisions. The entire testing phase took approximately 15 min to
complete. At the end of the experiment, all participants were given a debriefing
questionnaire that prompted them to verbalize any rule or regularity they might
have noticed during the course of the experiment. Finally, the questionnaire also
asked participants to supply their name, age, gender, nationality, occupation and
linguistic background.

Results
Grammaticality judgments. The analysis of the grammaticality judgments
showed that the experimental group classified 54.6% (SD = 12.2%) of the test
items correctly and the control group 51.9% (SD = 5.6%). The difference between
the two groups was not significant, t (33) = 0.805, p > .05. Further analysis showed
that neither the experimental group, t (19) = 1.685, p > .05, nor the control group,
t (14) = 1.302, p > .05, performed significantly above chance. The results thus
indicate that the training phase did not produce a learning effect in the experimental
group.

Confidence ratings. The following analyses only focus on the results of the
experimental group. In order to apply the binary confidence technique developed
by Kunimoto, Miller, and Pashler (2001), the grammaticality judgments and the
confidence ratings of the experimental group were converted into d  scores. In

the case of the grammaticality judgments, a positive d acc value indicated a higher

proportion of yes responses to grammatical stimuli and a negative d acc a higher
proportion of yes responses to ungrammatical stimuli. Good discrimination
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Figure 1. The d conf  scores. Each dot represents one experimental subject.
and d acc


between grammatical and ungrammatical stimuli is reflected in a positive d acc

value and poor discrimination in a d acc value of zero or below. In the case of

the confidence ratings, a positive d conf indicated more correct high-confidence
decisions than incorrect ones. In contrast, a negative d conf suggested more incorrect
high confidence decisions than correct ones. Conscious knowledge is reflected
 
in d conf values greater than zero; unconscious knowledge is reflected in d conf

values close to or below zero. The average d conf score for the experimental group
was 0.02 (SD = 0.79), which was not significantly different from zero, t (19) =
 
0.116, p > .05. Figure 1 plots d conf against d acc for all experimental subjects.

As Figure 1 indicates, 10 of the experimental subjects had a negative d conf value

(M = −0.7, SD = 0.3), whereas the other 10 had a positive d conf value (M =

0.7, SD = 0.4), t (18) = 8.752, p < .001. Because a negative d conf characterizes
subjects in which high confidence levels are not correlated with high accuracy

scores, the group with a negative d conf score will be referred to as unaware group

in subsequent analyses. In contrast, the group with the positive d conf score will be
referred to as aware group.

Classification performance of aware, unaware, and control participants.

OVERALL PERFORMANCE. The reanalysis of the grammaticality judgments

showed that the aware group classified 60.3% (SD = 10.7%) of the test items
correctly and the unaware group 49% (SD = 11.4%). A one-way analysis of
variance (ANOVA) showed that there were significant differences between the
aware, unaware, and control groups, F (2, 32) = 4.371, p < .05. Post hoc anal-
ysis with the Tukey honestly significant difference (HSD) test showed that the
aware group significantly outperformed both the unaware group (p < .05) and
Applied Psycholinguistics 33:4 841
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Figure 2. The classification performance of aware, unaware, and control subjects on grammat-
ical and ungrammatical items. Bars represent endorsement rates.

the control group (p < .05), which suggests that the training phase did produce a
learning effect but only in those participants that developed conscious knowledge.
The aware group also performed significantly above chance, t (9) = 3.027, p <
.05.

CLASSIFICATION PERFORMANCE ON GRAMMATICAL AND UNGRAMMATI-

CAL ITEMS. The performance of the three groups on grammatical and ungram-
matical items is represented in Figure 2. The results showed that the aware group
endorsed 72.1% (SD = 16.3%) of grammatical sentences and 51.6% (SD = 14.9%)
of ungrammatical sentences. The unaware group endorsed 70.9% (SD = 18.5%)
of grammatical sentences and 73% (SD = 12.9%) of ungrammatical sentences.
A one-way ANOVA further showed that there were significant differences among
the three groups on both grammatical items, F (2, 32) = 2.581, p < .05, and
ungrammatical items, F (2, 32) = 6.024, p < .01. Results of the post hoc analysis
using the Tukey HSD test showed that aware participants significantly outper-
formed controls on grammatical items (p < .05) but not on ungrammatical ones
(p > .05), which suggests that learning in the aware group was largely associated
with the endorsement of previously encountered syntactic patterns. There were no
differences between aware and unaware subjects on grammatical items, but aware
subjects were significantly more likely to reject ungrammatical items (p < .05).
Finally, there were no significant differences between unaware subjects and con-
trols on grammatical strings, but unaware subjects were significantly more likely
to endorse ungrammatical strings than the controls (p < .05). This suggests that
subjects in the unaware group acquired some knowledge as a result of exposure,
though this knowledge was largely unrelated to the actual semiartificial language.
Figure 2 illustrates the performance of aware, unaware and control subjects across
grammaticality.
Applied Psycholinguistics 33:4 842
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Figure 3. The classification performance of aware, unaware, and control subjects across sen-
tence types. Bars represent endorsement rates.

CLASSIFICATION PERFORMANCE ACROSS SENTENCE TYPES. Figure 3 il-

lustrates participants’ endorsement rates across the eight syntactic patterns em-
ployed in this experiment. The scores are summarized in Table 3. As has been
mentioned, the superior performance of the aware group was associated with the
ability to reject ungrammatical items. Further analysis showed that there were
significant differences between the three groups on V2–VF sentences, F (2, 32) =
0.789, p < .01, and ∗ VF–VF sentences, F (2, 32) = 4.568, p < .05. The effects
approach significance on VF–V1 sentences, F (2, 32) = 3.046, p = .06, ∗ VF
sentences, F (2, 32) = 2.704, p = .08, and ∗ V2–V1 sentences, F (2, 32) =
2.588, p = .09. The assumption of homogeneity of variance was violated for
∗
VF–VF sentences, but the Brown–Forsythe F ratio was nonetheless significant,
F (2, 29.9) = 5.488, p < .05. Results of the post hoc analyses, using the Tukey
HSD test for V2–VF sentences and the Games–Howell procedure for ∗ VF–VF
sentences, showed that aware and unaware subjects were significantly more likely
to endorse V2–VF sentences than the controls (both p < .05) and that unaware
subjects were significantly more likely to erroneously endorse ∗ VF–VF sentences
than either aware or control subjects (both p < .05). There was no difference
between aware and unaware subjects on V2–VF sentences and no difference
between aware subjects and controls on ∗ VF–VF sentences.

Verbal reports. The analysis of the verbal reports showed that, although most
participants in this experiment were able to report knowledge, there were no ver-
balizations that matched the verb placement rules of the semiartificial language.
No subject was able to provide descriptions of the verb placement rules employed
to generate the stimulus material or to provide correct examples of grammatical
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Table 3. Mean endorsement rates (%), standard deviations, and standard error
values for aware, unaware, and control participants across sentence types

Sentence Type

Groups V2 *VF V2VF *V3VF V2–VF *V2–V1 VF–V1 *VF–VF

Aware
M 85* 62.1 67.5† 52.5 76.3* 31.3* 59.8 60.5
SD 31.6 29.3 25.1 16.5 18.1 23.8 30.3 18.7
SE 10 9.3 7.9 5.2 5.7 7.5 9.6 5.9
Unaware
M 63.8 89.3** 76.3* 70* 81.3** 48.8 62.5 83.8**
SD 37 19.3 17.1 25.1 17.9 34.1 29.5 15.6
SE 11.7 6.1 5.4 7.9 5.7 10.8 9.3 4.9
Controls
M 74.6** 77.3* 67.1* 66.1* 56.7 24.4* 37.5† 55
SD 19.8 27.5 16.7 21.4 20 22.4 26.3 30.5
SE 5.1 7.1 5.5 5.2 5.8 7.9

Note: V, verb; VF, verb final.

Significance from chance: †p < 0.1. *p < .05. **p < .001.

sentences. The analysis of the verbal reports further suggests that participants
focused exclusively on the ordering of words within clauses, disregarding impor-
tant cues such as clause type and clause sequence. For example, nine subjects
mentioned that verbs could occur at the end of a sentence but did not link this
position to subordinate clauses. This might be taken as an indication that partici-
pants did not pay attention to phrasal arrangements above the clause level. Even
though subjects were conscious of some knowledge, the analysis of the verbal
reports suggests that subjects were largely unaware of the rules that determined
the placement of VPs.

Discussion
The results of Experiment 1 indicate that adult learners are able to acquire L2
syntax under incidental learning conditions, while processing auditory sentences
for meaning, without the benefit of corrective feedback and after a relatively
brief exposure period. The results further suggest that learners are able to trans-
fer knowledge to stimuli with the same underlying structure but new surface
features, which suggests that an abstract representation has been derived from
the original surface form. However, the findings also show that learning of the
semiartificial system was restricted to those subjects that became aware of having
acquired knowledge. Although learning in the experiments was incidental, that is,
a byproduct of auditory exposure to the training sentences, subjects were conscious
of having acquired knowledge.
Although a learning effect was observed in the aware group, the results also
showed that subjects did not acquire the relevant rule system. The acquisition of
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a rule system is best reflected in the capacity of dissociating grammatical and

ungrammatical strings categorically. In this experiment, for example, subjects
should have been able to endorse or reject a sentence purely on the basis of the
placement of the verb: if the VP occupied the appropriate position, a sentence
should have been endorsed; if it did not, the sentence should have been rejected.
This classification performance would have resulted in high endorsement rates
for grammatical stimuli and low endorsement rates for ungrammatical stimuli.
The analysis of the grammaticality judgments in this experiment showed that
this was not the case. The aware group performed significantly above chance on
grammatical items but performed only at chance level on ungrammatical ones. The
data suggests that, rather than basing decisions on rule knowledge, aware subjects
relied heavily on memory for previously encountered patterns when making their
grammaticality judgments. If a test stimulus matched a training pattern, as was
the case with the grammatical test sequences, subjects were likely to endorse it.
However, when a test stimulus did not resemble a training pattern, subjects were
reduced to guessing.
On a methodological note, the results of the experiment confirm that relying
on verbal reports in order to distinguish implicit and explicit knowledge is not
sufficient. The verbal reports collected at the end of the experiment were helpful
in determining what aspects of the semiartificial language subjects had noticed.
At the same time, however, reliance on verbal reports would not have permitted
the separation of the experimental group into aware and unaware subgroups. The
learning effect in the aware group would thus have gone unnoticed. The binary
confidence ratings, on the other hand, appeared sufficiently sensitive to detect
low levels of awareness but they provided little information about what subjects
noticed and were able to verbalize. The findings of Experiment 1 suggest that a
battery of awareness measures, for example, confidence ratings and verbal reports,
might be more adequate for the study of implicit language learning.

EXPERIMENT 2
In Experiment 2, the focus remains on the acquisition of verb placement rules
under incidental learning conditions. However, several changes were made to
the methods of the previous experiment. First, only three verb placement rules
determined the placement of VP in this experiment. Second, experimental subjects
were trained on the grammar by means of elicited imitations and plausibility
judgments. Finally, the testing phase was modified by adding a guess category to
the confidence ratings and by adding source attributions as an additional measure
of awareness. The aims of this experiment were (a) to establish whether the
addition of a training task that required subjects to process word order more directly
(through elicited imitations) had a positive effect on learning and (b) to evaluate the
usefulness of source attributions for dissociating implicit and explicit knowledge.

Method
Participants. Thirty native speakers of English (22 women, 8 men; Mage = 24.3
years) were recruited to take part in this experiment and evenly distributed into
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experimental and control conditions. The majority of participants (28) were uni-
versity students and none had a background in German or any other V2 language.
There were no significant differences between experimental and control groups
across the variables age, gender, occupation (student vs. nonstudent), and number
of languages acquired (all p > .05). Subjects received £5 for participating in the
experiment.

Stimulus material. As in the previous experiment, a semiartificial language, con-

sisting of English words and German syntax, was used to generate the stimulus
material. In contrast, however, the linguistic focus was on only three verb place-
ment rules: V2, VF, and V1. The split VP rule was removed because it was felt
that the presence of two rules associated with VPs in final positions—split VP and
VF—might hinder learning. The rule system in this experiment was somewhat
simpler in that the placement of VP was only dependent on the type of clause
(main vs. subordinate) and on the type of clause sequence (main–subordinate
vs. subordinate–main). The type of predicate was no longer relevant for verb
placement.
A total of 180 sentences were drafted for this experiment. The sentences were
read out by a male native speaker of British English, digitally recorded on a Sony
Mini-Disc player (MZ-R700) and subsequently edited with sound processing
software (Audacity, version 1.2.4).

TRAINING SET. The training set consisted of 120 different sentences and was
subdivided into 60 plausible constructions and 60 implausible ones. Plausible and
implausible items were again designed so that participants would have to process
the entire auditory string before being able to judge its plausibility. In order to train
the experimental group, 40 sentences were created for each verb placement rule.
That is, 40 sentences followed the V2 sentence pattern, 40 followed the V2–VF
pattern, and another 40 the VF–V1 pattern. All sentences were in the past tense.
A frequency analysis of the training set showed that the average sentence length
was 9.7 words per sentence in V2 constructions (9.9 for plausible items, 9.5 for
implausible ones), 12.9 for VF–V1 constructions (13.2 plausible, 12.7 implausi-
ble), and 10.8 words per sentence for V2–VF constructions (10.6 plausible, 11
implausible).

TESTING SET. The testing set consisted of 60 new sentences and was subdivided
into 30 grammatical and 30 ungrammatical items. The grammatical sentences
followed the same syntactic patterns as the training sentences (V2, V2–VF, VF–
V1). The ungrammatical templates were similar to the grammatical ones with the
exception that the position of the VP was incorrect (∗ V1, ∗ V3, ∗ V4, ∗ VF, ∗ VF–V2,
∗
V1–VF). With the exception of a limited number of function words, no words
were repeated from the training set. Table 4 illustrates the syntactic patterns that
could occur in the testing phase.
A frequency analysis of the testing set indicated that the average sentence length
was 11.1 words per sentence for grammatical items and 11.6 for ungrammatical
items. There was no significant difference between training and testing sets with
Applied Psycholinguistics 33:4 846
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Table 4. Grammatical and ungrammatical patterns used in the testing set

Pattern Grammatical

V2 Yesterday scribbled David a long letter to his family.

V2–VF In the afternoon acknowledged David that her children to England
moved.
VF–V1 When his wife in the afternoon the office building left, prepared Jim
dinner for the entire family.

Ungrammatical

*V1 Imitated Peter recently his best employee during the Christmas dinner.
*V3 Recently David consulted an accountant during a five-hour meeting.
*V4 In the afternoon Peter his decision undermined with poignant arguments.
*VF After dinner Chloe an old car with her savings bought.
*VF–V2 When her director after dinner confidential information divulged, Susan
quit the department.
*V1–VF Discussed Jim after dinner the new CD with his friend after his wife the
kids to bed took.

Note: The sentences are examples taken from the testing set. V, verb; VF, verb final.

regard to sentence length, F (1, 193) = 0.922, p > .05, that is, sentence length was
not a reliable cue to grammaticality in the testing phase.

Procedure.

TRAINING PHASE. The training procedure for experimental participants was

similar to the one employed in Experiment 1, with one exception. Elicited imi-
tations were added to the training task in order to encourage subjects to process
word order more directly. Participants were instructed to listen to the training
set on an item by item basis, to repeat each sentence after a delayed prompt
(1500 ms), and to judge whether the statement made was semantically plausible
or not. The training phase took, on average, 40 min to complete. Controls did not
receive any training.

TESTING PHASE. Experimental participants were informed that the word order
in the previous sentences was not arbitrary but that it followed a “complex system”
instead. They were then instructed to listen to 60 new scrambled sentences, only
half of which would follow the same rule system as the sequences they had just
been exposed to. In contrast to the previous experiment, subjects were asked to
judge the basis of their grammaticality decision as well. That is, for each test
sentence, participants were required to decide on its grammaticality, to report how
confident they were in their judgment, and to indicate what the basis of their
judgment was.
Participants could indicate their levels of confidence by selecting one of three
response options: guess, somewhat confident, or very confident. Participants were
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instructed to select the guess category only if they had no confidence whatsoever
in their classification decision and believed to be guessing. If they had a small
amount of confidence, they were asked to select the somewhat confident category
instead. If they were very confident, they should opt for the very confident category.
In the case of the source attributions, participants were asked to select one of four
response options: guess, intuition, memory, and rule knowledge. Participants were
instructed to only use the guess category when decisions were based on real
guesses, that is, they might as well have flipped a coin. The intuition category
should be selected if participants were somewhat confident in their decisions but
did not know why they were right. The memory category should be selected when
judgments were based on the recollection of parts or entire sentences from the
training phase. Finally, the rule knowledge category should be selected following
decisions that were based on a rule that was acquired during the training phase and
that subjects would be able to report at the end of the experiment. All participants
were provided with these instructions before starting the testing phase.
The test sentences were presented to each participant in random order. The
testing phase began with a short practice session, which consisted of four practice
trials that were not repeated in the actual testing set. The entire testing phase took
approximately 15 min. Afterward, participants completed the same debriefing
questionnaire used in the previous experiment.

Results
Performance on the grammaticality judgment task served as the measure of learn-
ing. Verbal reports, confidence ratings, and source attributions were employed to
determine to what extent subjects were aware of having acquired knowledge and
whether the acquired knowledge was conscious or not.

Grammaticality judgments.

OVERALL PERFORMANCE. The analysis of the grammaticality judgments

showed that the experimental group classified 61.6% (SD = 8.3%) of the test items
correctly and the control group 42.9% (SD = 5.1%). The difference between the
two groups was significant, t (27) = 7.289, p < .001. Further analysis showed that
the experimental group performed significantly above chance on this task, t (13) =
5.150, p < .001, whereas the controls scored significantly below chance, t (14) =
−5.361, p < .001. The training phase produced a clear learning effect in the
experimental participants.
In order to establish whether any improvements in accuracy occurred during
the testing phase, the grammaticality judgment data was equally divided into 10
chronological stages. The mean accuracy for each block of six judgments was then
computed for both groups. A repeated-measures ANOVA showed no significant
differences across the stages in the experimental group, F (9, 117) = 0.760, p > .05,
or in the control group, F (5.1, 71.9) = 0.722, p > .05, with Greenhouse–Geisser
correction. No online learning effect was observed during the testing phase, that
is, the learning effect in the experimental group was a result of exposure during
the training phase.
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Figure 4. The classification performance of experimental and control subjects across sentence
types.

CLASSIFICATION PERFORMANCE ON GRAMMATICAL AND UNGRAMMATI-

CAL ITEMS. The following analyses report endorsement rates, rather than accu-
racy scores. The results showed that the experimental group endorsed 71% (SD
= 13.5%) of all grammatical sentences and 47% (SD = 19.7%) of all ungram-
matical ones. No experimental subject endorsed more than 90% of grammatical
sequences and less than 10% of ungrammatical ones, that is, there was no evidence
of categorical classification performance. The control group only endorsed 36.4%
(SD = 30.3%) of grammatical sentences and 51% (SD = 28.4%) of ungrammat-
ical ones, t (14) = −5.268, p < .001. The difference between experimental and
control subjects on grammatical items was significant, F (1, 27) = 14.824, p <
.001, that is, the experimental group was significantly more likely to correctly
endorse grammatical strings. The difference between groups on ungrammatical
strings was not significant, however, F (1, 27) = 0.125, p > .05. That is, the
classification performance of the experimental groups was largely driven by the
correct endorsement of grammatical items.

CLASSIFICATION PERFORMANCE ACROSS SENTENCE TYPES. Figure 4 il-

lustrates participants’ endorsement rates across the nine syntactic templates em-
ployed in this experiment. The scores are summarized in Table 5. The analysis
indicated that the experimental group was significantly more likely than the control
group to correctly endorse all grammatical sentence types, that is, V2 sentences,
F (1, 27) = 6.426, p < .05, V2–VF sentences, F (1, 27) = 15.778, p < .001, and
VF–V1 sentences, F (1, 27) = 8.831, p < .05. The experimental group thus dis-
played a clear preference for endorsing previously encountered sentence patterns.
The experimental group was also significantly more likely to correctly reject ∗ V3
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Table 5. Mean endorsement rates (%), standard deviations, and standard error
values for experimental and control participants across sentence types

Sentence Types

Group *V1 V2 *V3 *V4 *VF V2–VF *V1–VF VF–V1 *VF–V2

Exp.
M 38.6 73.4* 22.9* 51.4 78.6** 71.4** 58.6 66.9* 34.3
SD 36.3 27.6 35.8 33 22.8 18.8 35.5 29.2 30.8
SE 9.7 7.4 9.6 8.8 6.1 5 9.5 7.8 8.2
Controls
M 36 42.7 97.3** 38.3 49.3 35.3† 32† 31.3 50.7
SD 34 36.7 7 37.0 42.7 28.8 35.3 34.8 38.4
SE 8.8 9.5 1.8 9.6 11.0 7.4 9.1 9 9.9

Note: V, verb; VF, verb final.

Significance from chance: †p < .07. *p < .05. **p < .001.

sentences, F (1, 27) = 62.401, p < .001. That experimental subjects only endorsed
22.9% of ∗ V3 sentences, compared to the 97.3% endorsement rate in the control
group, is interesting because the latter are the most English-like structures in the
experiment. It suggests that the experimental group had learned to reject a sentence
type that would otherwise be acceptable in English. Experimental subjects were
also significantly more likely to erroneously endorse stand-alone ∗ VF sentences, F
(1, 27) = 5.18, p < .05, which suggests that they had not learned that clause-final
VPs were restricted to subordinate clauses. In the case of ∗ V1–VF sentences, the
difference between experimental and control subjects approaches significance, F
(1, 27) = 4.083, p = .053. There were no significant differences between the
groups on ∗ V1, ∗ V4, and ∗ VF–V2.

Confidence ratings. The following analyses only report the results of the exper-
imental group. The average confidence level in the experimental group was 5.9
(SD = 1.8). In terms of proportion, experimental participants tended to select the
option somewhat confident most frequently and the guess option least frequently.
In terms of accuracy, the analysis indicated that experimental participants were
most accurate when reporting to be very confident in their decisions and slightly
less accurate when reporting to be somewhat confident. Accuracy was lowest for
those grammaticality decisions in which subjects had no confidence whatsoever.
Experimental participants scored significantly above chance when reporting to be
somewhat confident and very confident. When participants reported to be guess-
ing, performance was indistinguishable from chance. The guessing criterion for
unconscious judgment knowledge was thus not satisfied. Table 6 summarizes the
findings.
The Chan difference score was computed in order to establish whether learning
in the experimental group was implicit by the zero correlation criterion. The
average confidence for correct grammaticality decisions was 6.1 (SD = 1.6) and the
average confidence for incorrect decisions was 5.6 (SD = 1.7), that is, experimental
Applied Psycholinguistics 33:4 850
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Table 6. Accuracy and proportions (%) across confidence ratings

Guess Somewhat Confident Very Confident

Accuracy 53 60* 65*

Proportion 12 54 34

Significance from chance: *p < .05.

Table 7. Accuracy and proportions (%) across

source attributions

Guess Intuition Memory Rule

Accuracy 56 59* 57 65**

Proportion 10 32 15 43

Significance from chance: *p < .05. **p < .001.

participants were more confident in correct decisions than in incorrect ones. The
difference (0.5) was significant, t (13) = 2.310, p < .05. That is, there was conscious
judgment knowledge according to the zero correlation criterion. Participants were
partially aware that they had acquired some knowledge during the training phase.

Source attributions. In terms of proportion, experimental participants most fre-

quently believed their classification decisions to be based on rule knowledge,
followed by intuition and memory (Table 7). The guess category was selected
least frequently. In terms of accuracy, experimental participants scored highest
when reporting to use rule knowledge to guide their decisions, followed by the
intuition and memory categories. Subjects were least accurate when basing deci-
sions on guesses (56%). Participants performed significantly above chance when
basing their decisions on rule knowledge or on intuition. The latter suggests that
participants acquired some unconscious structural knowledge.

Verbal reports. The analysis of the verbal reports showed that there were no ver-
balizations that matched the rules of the semiartificial language. As in Experiment
1, several subjects mentioned that verbs could occur in sentence-final position
but did not associate this verb placement option with subordinate clauses. Even
though subjects were conscious of some knowledge, as suggested by the analysis
of the source judgments, the analysis of the verbal reports suggests that subjects
were largely unaware of the rules that determine the placement of VPs.

DISCUSSION
Experiment 2 confirms that adult learners are able to acquire the syntax of a
novel language without intending to, while processing auditory sentences for
meaning, without feedback and after limited exposure. Because subjects were
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able to transfer their knowledge to judge the grammaticality of novel stimuli,

the findings also support the view that learners derived an abstract representation
of the training sentences. Of importance, Experiment 2 provided evidence that
incidental exposure to L2 syntax can result in unconscious knowledge. That is,
at least some of the learning in this experiment was implicit (see also Hamrick
& Rebuschat, in press; Tagarelli et al., 2011). The analysis of confidence ratings
and source attributions showed that, although subjects were aware that they had
acquired knowledge, they were at least partially unaware of what knowledge they
had acquired. When attributing grammaticality judgments to intuition, subjects
performed significantly above chance, that is, they had acquired unconscious
structural knowledge. At the same time, it is important to highlight that subjects
in Experiment 2 were significantly more accurate when reporting higher levels of
confidence and when basing their decisions on explicit categories (memory and
rule knowledge). Conscious, but unverbalizable knowledge was clearly linked to
improved performance in the grammaticality judgment task.
Experiment 2 introduced several modifications to the design of the previous
experiment. Three, rather than four, verb placement rules determined the place-
ment of VP, which meant that the position of the verb was only dependent on
clause type and on clause sequence. Elicited imitations were introduced as an
additional training task, and source attributions were added to the testing phase
as an additional measure of awareness. As mentioned above, Experiment 2 was
designed in order to establish whether the addition of a training task that required
subjects to process word order more directly had a positive effect on learning
and to evaluate the usefulness of source attributions for distinguishing implicit
and explicit knowledge. The results showed that the modifications produced a
greater learning effect in the experimental group (61.6%, compared to 54.6%
in Experiment 1). As in Experiment 1, performance was largely driven by the
above-chance endorsement of grammatical sentences. Experimental participants
endorsed 71% of all grammatical items but also 47% of ungrammatical items,
which indicates that classification performance might have been partially based
on memory for previously encountered patterns (see also Ellis et al., 2009). That
classification performance was not categorical, but probabilistic, further suggests
that subjects did not acquire the verb placement rules. Accuracy for grammatical
items was 77.2%, but at chance (53.8%) for ungrammatical items. When partici-
pants based their classifications on rule knowledge, these rules did not correspond
to the word order rules of the semiartificial language. The analysis of the verbal
reports supports this view.
The performance across sentence types suggests that subjects did not learn that
clause type and clause sequence determined the placement of VPs. ∗ VF sentences,
for example, were overendorsed, which means that subjects did not know that a
verb could only occur at the end of a specific clause type. Subjects were more
likely to endorse VF–V1 sentences than their ungrammatical counterparts, ∗ VF–
V2, but the preference for VF–V1 could be explained by the acquisition of a
microrule like “a verb can follow a verb in the middle of a sentence.” There would
be no need to assume that subjects had acquired the V1 rule. That subjects were
just as likely to endorse V2–VF sentences as ∗ V1–VF sentences supports the
notion that subjects did not learn that clause sequence was a relevant cue to verb
placement.
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Rebuschat & Williams: Implicit and explicit knowledge in SLA

Because several changes were made to the previous design, it is difficult to

judge what particular modification has improved performance in this experiment.
One possibility is that this was due to the addition of the elicited imitations. In
contrast to Experiment 1, subjects in the present experiment had to focus both on
the arrangement of words and on sentence meaning. That subjects had to recall
word order in order to perform on the training task could have increased learning
by making them process serial order more directly. A different possibility is that
the removal of the split VP rule simplified the grammar and made the structure
of the stimulus sentences easier to acquire. Although subjects did not learn to
associate verb positions with specific types of clauses or clause arrangements, this
simplification could have led them to learn what positions were licensed by the
grammar. This seems unlikely, however, given that trained subjects in Experiment
1 appear to have learned similar things. Both groups knew, for example, that
a verb could come in second or in final position but not that clause type or
clause sequence played a role in verb placement. A third possibility is that the
ungrammatical templates used in Experiment 2 were easier to reject than those
employed in the previous experiments. Experimental subjects in Experiments 1
and 2 were equally likely to endorse grammatical sentences, but subjects in the
former experiment were more likely to wrongly endorse ungrammatical ones.
Perhaps subjects in Experiment 2 would have performed equally poorly had they
been asked to judge ∗ V3VF, ∗ V2–V1, and ∗ VF–VF sentences instead of ∗ V1, ∗ V3,
∗
V4, ∗ VF, ∗ V1–VF, and ∗ VF–V2.
In terms of methodology, Experiment 2 further confirms that the sole reliance
on verbal reports is clearly inadequate for assessing awareness. The analysis of the
verbal reports showed that participants were unable to verbally describe the rules
of the semiartificial system, which would have supported the erroneous assumption
that learning in Experiment 2 resulted entirely in an implicit knowledge base. That
subjects developed conscious judgment knowledge would have gone unnoticed.
The combined use of confidence ratings and source attributions appears to be a
promising method for distinguishing implicit and explicit knowledge (see also
Rebuschat, in press-a) in language acquisition research.

CONCLUSION
The results of the two experiments described above show that adult learners can
acquire the syntax of a novel language without intending to and while processing
auditory sequences for meaning. The findings further show that incidental exposure
to the stimulus sentences resulted in an abstract, generalizable representation, and
that subjects did not acquire linguistic rules. The analysis of the different awareness
measures suggests that subjects were aware of having acquired knowledge and
that exposure resulted in both conscious and unconscious knowledge. Although
adults seem capable of implicit learning, it was also clear that conscious, but unver-
balizable knowledge was linked to improved performance in the grammaticality
judgment task.
The findings reported in this study have several implications for our under-
standing of language acquisition. Although the precise form of the knowledge
acquired in these experiments is unclear, the findings provided no evidence for
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Rebuschat & Williams: Implicit and explicit knowledge in SLA

rule learning in the vast majority of subjects. It suggests that subjects in these
types of experiments (and perhaps in natural language acquisition) do not ac-
quire linguistic rules. The results support Shanks (1995; Johnstone & Shanks,
2001), who argues against the possibility of implicit rule learning. Additional
research is necessary to characterize the nature of what was learned incidentally
and to determine more precisely what conditions might lead to successful rule
acquisition. For example, it would be important to establish whether increased ex-
posure would lead to the development of rule knowledge under incidental learning
conditions.
Although adults can acquire unconscious knowledge, the experiments reported
in this article demonstrate that adult syntactic learning results predominantly in a
conscious (but largely unverbalizable) knowledge base. This might explain why
learning was very much constrained across all experiments. ∗ VF sentences, for
example, were generally accepted as grammatical, even though this option was
restricted to subordinate clauses. It would be of interest to run the same, or a slightly
adapted, version of Experiments 1 and 2 with children in order to determine
whether there are child–adult differences in syntactic learning. Young learners,
especially preschoolers without extensive metalinguistic knowledge, might display
more implicit learning than adults. It would be also interesting to establish whether
this would lead to greater learning effects across patterns. If this were the case,
then the fact that adults are potentially less likely to engage in implicit learning of
a novel language might help explain why they frequently fail to achieve nativelike
levels of proficiency in a novel language, despite prolonged periods of exposure.
From a methodological perspective, the results of the experiments confirm that
relying on verbal reports as a measure of awareness is not sufficient (for alternative
measures, see Rebuschat, 2011). The verbal reports collected at the end of the
experiment were helpful in determining what aspects of the semiartificial language
subjects had consciously noticed. At the same time, verbal reports were clearly
not sensitive enough to assess whether subjects were aware of the knowledge they
had acquired. Confidence ratings and source attributions provided a very useful
method for capturing low levels of awareness and to observe the conscious status
of both structural and judgment knowledge. Future experiments on first language
and L2 acquisition would benefit from the introduction of this relatively simple,
but effective way of measuring implicit and explicit knowledge.
As far as the assessment of learning effects is concerned, it would be useful
to explore whether the binary grammaticality judgments used in this study are an
adequate measure of learning. It could be, for example, that learning would not
have appeared as constrained if more sensitive measures had been used. Scott and
Dienes (2008) have shown that familiarity is the essential source of knowledge in
AGL, which suggests that, in terms of offline measures, familiarity or preference
judgments might be more suitable. The use of online measures in particular, for ex-
ample, tracking eye movements, recording response latency (e.g., in a rapid serial
visual presentation task), or measuring event-related potentials (e.g., Tokowicz
& MacWhinney, 2006), seems to be a promising way to assess the knowledge
underlying native-speaker intuitions. Finally, it should also be noted that the two
experiments above focused on comprehension tasks. Given that communication
involves both comprehension and production of language, it would be important
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Rebuschat & Williams: Implicit and explicit knowledge in SLA

to determine whether the knowledge acquired in artificial language experiments

transfers successfully to production tasks. However, further research is neces-
sary to address the shortcomings and the unanswered questions of the present
study.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank Zoltán Dienes, Ron Leow, and Brechtje Post for their comments on earlier drafts
of this article. We are also grateful to Phillip Hamrick, Kaitlyn Tagarelli, Katie Jeong-eun
Kim, and Julie Lake for helpful discussions and feedback. Finally, we thank the anonymous
reviewers for their constructive suggestions.

NOTES
1. In this paper, we will use the following definitions. Implicit learning is the learning
process that results primarily in unconscious knowledge, that is, knowledge that is tacit
and inaccessible to conscious introspection. Implicit learning generally occurs without
the intention to learn and without awareness of what has been learned, that is, learners
are often unaware of having acquired knowledge. (In keeping with the psychological
literature, implicit learning will not be used to refer to “learning without attention”
or “learning without noticing.”) Explicit learning is the learning process that results
primarily in conscious knowledge. This is usually associated with intentional learning
conditions. We will use the terms implicit knowledge and unconscious knowledge as
well as explicit knowledge and conscious knowledge interchangeably.
2. As Rebuschat and Williams (in press) point out, these two dimensions, intentionality
and awareness, are central to the notions of implicit and explicit learning in the
psychological literature. In the research tradition started by Reber (1967), the use of
the term implicit is generally restricted to those situations where subjects have acquired
unconscious knowledge under incidental learning conditions. If incidental exposure
in an experiment results in conscious knowledge, for example, when subjects were
able to figure out the rule system despite not having been told about its existence, the
learning process is usually only characterized as being incidental and not as implicit.
The same applies for those experiments that do not include a measure of awareness.
Of importance, the three measures of awareness discussed in this paper assess the
conscious or unconscious status of the acquired knowledge. That is, the focus here
is on the product of learning, and not on awareness (or lack thereof) at the time of
encoding.
3. Another important lesson from Robinson (1995) is that we need to be careful with
wording. Subjects in the “implicit” group clearly acquired conscious knowledge, so
learning in this condition was not implicit at all.

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