runningheadunconsciousknowledgeofform-meaning.docVIP

Running head: Unconscious knowledge of form-meaning connections Unconscious Structural Knowledge of Form-meaning Connections Weiwen Chen School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China Xiuyan Guo School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China; Department of Psychology, Fudan University, Shanghai, China Jinghua Tang School of Psychology, Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Nanjing, China Lei Zhu Department of Psychology, Fudan University, Shanghai, China Zhiliang Yang School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China Zoltan Dienes School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Prof. Xiuyan Guo School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University North Zhongshan Road 3663, Shanghai 200062, China Tel: +86 21Fax: +86 21E-mail: xyguo@; xyguo2006@ Unconscious Structural Knowledge of Form-meaning Connections Abstract We investigated the implicit learning of a linguistically relevant variable (animacy) in a natural language context (namely, the relation of forms of determiners to semantics). Trial by trial subjective measures indicated that exposure to a form-animacy regularity led to unconscious knowledge of that regularity. Under the same conditions, people did not learn about another form-meaning regularity when a linguistically arbitrary variable was used instead of animacy (size relative to a dog). Implicit learning is constrained to acquire unconscious knowledge about features with high prior probabilities of being relevant in that domain. Key words: implicit learning, form-meaning connections, structural knowledge, intuition Unconscious structural knowledge of form-meaning connections 1 Introduction Grammatical knowledge of our native language stands as a prototypical example of implicit knowledge (even if not al