Familiarity breeds consent: Is structural facilitation evidence for the implicit knowledge of syntactic structures

Can structural facilitation (ease of syntactic processing) be taken as evidence that syntactic knowledge is the result of the implicit memory of previously encountered syntactic structures? This dissertation presents the results of four experiments which extend the experimental methods of implicit processing.;The experiments examine whether the standard methods established in the implicit memory and implicit learning literatures can be used to measure conceptual fluency (structural facilitation) for recently read sentences. The experiments have three parts: a learning phase in which participants read sentences for content, a 5 minute distractor task on analytic reasoning, and a testing phase in which participants are asked to rate identical or syntactically similar sentences for grammatical acceptability. Sentences which syntactically similar to sentences read during the learning phase are predicted to be processed more quickly and easily. It is assumed, in accord with the misattribution literature, that the metacognitive processes erroneously evaluate the surprising facilitation in processing as being due to grammatical acceptability. All of the studies use written sentence stimuli in English and each experimental condition employs 24 male and female native speakers of English as participants.;The results support the hypothesis that structural fluency can be investigated using methods which paradigmatically define implicit memory and implicit learning. This research integrates the psycholinguistic studies on structural facilitation (including syntactic accommodation, structural persistence, and syntactic priming) with research in cognitive psychology on implicit memory, implicit learning, sources of misattribution in memory, and the interaction of implicit knowledge with metacognitive processing. The results have a number of implications for domains such as sentence memory, language acquisition, language change, and linguistic theory.;These studies support the hypothesis that there is an autonomous cognitive representation of syntactic knowledge. By extending the implicit learning paradigm to include structural facilitation, we are able to extend our understanding of the mechanisms involved in syntactic representation and syntactic processing, as well as clarifying some of the cognitive factors which influence metalinguistic evaluation.