Abstract

People can learn knowledge without realizing what is happening, It is called implicit learning; learning with no the intervention of consciousness. The mechanism of the implicit learning has been explained by three parts: structure-abstraction, instance-encoding, episodic-processing. In this study, using Korean as stimulus, we could verify the generality of the implicit learning. The episodic-processing explanation was tested whether it is the processing mechanism of the implicit learning. In this study, we also compared implicit learning transfer to language learning by investigating whether the rule acquired in implicit learning could be transferred to other language. In experiment 1, we replicated Whittlesea & Wright (1997)'s experiment 3. This experiment consisted of 3 conditions: standard rule condition, training stimuli repeated condition, test stimuli repeated condition. In consequence, we could confirm that a general phenomenon for human being, because the accuracy of well-formedness task in Korean was above chance. As Whittlesea et al. (1997) proposed, among three conditions, training stimuli repeated condition revealed the lowest accuracy and standard rule condition showed the highest accuracy. This result confirmed that implicit learning is not to be acquired automatically without the intervention of consciousness, rather it is acquired with subjects' intention. That is, it is replicated the preceded study that processing mechanism of implicit learning is followed by episodic-processing. Experiment 2 was carried out in two parts; Korean-to-Korean transfer condition and Korean-to-English transfer condition, which have different surface structure of learning phase and test phase. This experiment proved that if learning stimuli and test stimuli have the same deep-structure, implicit learning transfer occur regardless of surface-structure. It demonstrated that even if the learning language and test language are different, implicit learning transfer could be generated cross-linguistically.