| Four experiments examined the roles of attentional capacity and type of instructions on the learning of two types of information: artificial grammar structures and rules governing the formation of natural language sentences.; In Experiment 1, participants studied letter strings generated either by an easy, alphabet-based rule or by a complex, finite-state grammar. Attentional capacity was reduced for half of the participants through the use of a secondary tone-counting task during training. In addition, half of the participants in each condition were explicitly told to search for the underlying rules. The remaining participants were not told to search for rules.; Results indicate that explicit instructions to search for rules were helpful only when no secondary task was required. In addition, such explicit instructions were helpful for those studying stimuli generated by the easy rule but not by the complex grammar.; In Experiment 2, all participants studied stimuli generated by the complex grammar but no secondary task was required. It was found that extending the number of training trials improved performance for those who had received implicit instructions, but not for those who had received explicit instructions.; In Experiment 3, the secondary task was re-introduced and all participants learned the complex grammar with extended training. In this experiment, no differences were found between those participants who had received implicit instructions and those who had received explicit instructions.; Finally, in Experiment 4, the variables of attentional capacity, type of instructions, secondary task, and length of training were examined for the learning of vocabulary and morphology in a foreign language.; Extended training and the lack of a secondary task were beneficial for the recognition of foreign-language vocabulary and morphology. When learners' ability to produce foreign-language sentences was tested, however, lack of a secondary task led to relatively high performance for old stimulus combinations, but less advantage for novel stimulus combinations. |
