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IMPLICIT LEARNING

المؤلف:  John Field

المصدر:  Psycholinguistics

الجزء والصفحة:  P127

2025-08-30

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IMPLICIT LEARNING

The acquisition of information without an awareness on the learner’s part that learning has occurred; the reverse of explicit learning. Not to be confused with incidental learning, where information or skills are acquired which were not part of the original learning intention or task.

It has been argued that implicit learning may play a part in second language acquisition. Experiments have been conducted with artificial grammars consisting of strings of letters whose order and co occurrence is determined by specific rules. After extended exposure to these letter strings, subjects have proved capable, at a level higher than chance, of distinguishing strings which are ‘grammatical’ (permissible) from those which are not. However, this result may be attributable to an ‘analogy’ effect, where subjects learn to recognise certain recurrent patterns rather than necessarily accessing the rules which underlie them. Questions have also been raised as to whether the acquisition of a ‘grammar’ of this kind can be said to model the acquisition of normal grammatical rules. The grammar can be said to possess ‘phrase structure’ but it is not meaningful or contextualised in the way that natural language data is; nor is there any speaker-listener interaction to support acquisition.

See also: Incidental learning

Further reading: Ellis (1994)