L'apprentissage implicite : le cas des grammaires artificielles

Abstract

Summary: Implicit learning: The case of artificial grammars. This paper is an attempt to put the work of the past several decades on the problems of implicit learning and unconscious cognition in a diachronic perspective, through an illustration by the oldest and best known paradigm in the field, namely the «implicit learning of artificial grammars». In the first part, we expose Arthur Reber's pioneering work on artificial grammar learning since the I960's. According to this author, implicit learning is an inductive process whereby knowledge of a complex environment is acquired and used largely independently ofawareness ofeither the process of acquisition or the nature of that which has been learned. In the second part, we show that this interpretation has been the object of a controversy by numerous papers. We adopt the proposal that this phenomenon does not testify to the unconscious abstraction of the rules underlying the situation, as held by the prevalent, abstractionist interpretation. Indeed, performance improvement can be accounted for by a memory-based framework positing that subjects only learn specifie fragments of the material, which constitute the basic functional unit of knowledge in most learning conditions. In the third part, possible implications of this theory on the role of unconscious and conscious processes in adaptive behavior are discussed. Our proposai is that the processes engagea in implicit learning can be accounted for within the conceptual framework underlying implicit memory studies. The same processes may be underlying performance in the two types of implicit tasks. Key words : implicit learning, implicit memory, artificial grammars, cognitive unconscious, theory of evolution.