The study aims to help characterize the sort of structures about which people can acquire unconscious knowledge. It is already well established that people can implicitly learn n-grams and also repetition patterns. We explore the acquisition of unconscious structural knowledge of symmetry. Chinese Tang poetry uses a specific sort of mirror symmetry, an inversion rule with respect to the tones of characters in successive lines of verse. We show, using artificial poetry to control both n-gram structure and repetition patterns, that (...) people can implicitly learn to discriminate inversions from non-inversions, presenting a challenge to existing models of implicit learning. (shrink)

An experiment explored the acquisition of conscious and unconscious knowledge of semantic prosody in a second language under incidental and intentional learning conditions. Semantic prosody is the conotational coloring of the semantics of a word, largely uncaptured by dictionary definitions. Contrary to some claims in the literature, we revealed that both conscious and unconscious knowledge were involved in the acquisition of semantic prosody. Intentional learning resulted in similar unconscious but more conscious knowledge than incidental learning. The results are discussed in (...) terms of second language learning and the nature of unconscious knowledge. (shrink)

It is well-documented that children do not begin school as blank slates but that they bring with them extensive knowledge about how the world around them works. This conceptual knowledge, embedded within rich theoretical structures, is not always accurate and requires change through learning and instruction. Yet some ideas – such as object motion – appear to be particularly resistant to such change. So how can conceptual change be achieved or facilitated? Collaboration, for one, has long been recognised as a (...) beneficial learning and teaching approach, including early science education. However, for deep-rooted ideas collaborating with others may not always have the desired impact. Instead, the notion of self-collaboration is considered in this review. The current state of research in the field of predictive and underlying knowledge in childhood is outlined and different models of how the knowledge systems relate to each other are discussed. While further work is still needed to establish a clearer picture of how self-collaboration might effect conceptual change, research to-date clearly identifies significant differences between predictive and underlying knowledge structures throughout childhood, how these structures can be related to traditional conceptual change theories, and how they may play a role in future learning and instructional approaches. (shrink)