Abstract
Fluency influences grammaticality judgments of visually presented strings in artificial grammar learning (AGL). Of many potential sources that engender fluency, symmetry is considered to be an important factor. However, symmetry may function differently for visual and auditory stimuli, which present computationally different problems. Thus, the current study aimed to examine whether objectively manipulating fluency by speeding up perception (i.e., manipulating the inter-stimulus interval, ISI, between each syllable of a string) influenced judgments of tonal strings; and thus how symmetry-based fluency might influence judgments. In Experiment 1, with only a test phase, participants were required to give their preference ratings of tonal strings as a measurement of fluency. In experiment 2, participants were instructed to make grammaticality judgments after being incidentally trained on tonal symmetry. Results of Experiment 1 showed that tonal strings with shorter ISI were liked more than those with longer ISI while such difference was not found between symmetric and asymmetric strings without training. Additionally, Experiment 2 found both main effects of symmetry and ISI as well as an interaction. In particular, only asymmetric strings were more likely to be judged as grammatical when they were presented at a shorter ISI. Taken together, participants were sensitive to the fluency induced by the manipulation of ISI and sensitive to symmetry only after training. In sum, we conclude that objective speed influenced grammaticality judgments, implicit learning of tonal symmetry resulted in enhanced fluency, and that fluency may serve as a basis for grammaticality judgments.
Highlights
Processing fluency refers to a personal feeling of ease when the individual is performing a cognitive operation (Reber et al, 2004b)
To further investigate the role of the fluency induced by tonal symmetry in artificial grammar learning (AGL), participants were instructed to classify whether the novel strings in test phase were grammatical or not
Ling et al (2016) further revealed that after implicit learning the symmetric rule, fluency in the form of reaction times was enhanced for tonal symmetric strings compared to asymmetric strings
Summary
Processing fluency refers to a personal feeling of ease when the individual is performing a cognitive operation (Reber et al, 2004b). The current study aimed to examine how symmetry-based fluency might influence grammaticality judgments of tonal strings and to compare such an influence on the effect of fluency being experienced by speeding up the perception process of stimulus. The latter manipulation directly affects the time of processing of the whole stimulus, and can test whether people are sensitive to objective fluency, the claimed variable training is said to affect. Whether symmetric strings are liked more than asymmetric ones depends on whether tonal symmetry elicits fluency without training
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