Non-linguistic pattern learning uses distinct implicit and explicit processes, which differ in behavioural signatures, inductive biases and proposed model architectures. This study asked whether both processes are available in phonotactic learning in the lab. Five Internet experiments collected generalisation, learning curves, response times and detailed debriefings from 671 valid participants. Implicit and explicit learners were found in all conditions and experiments. Objective measures of implicit vs. explicit learning were correlated with introspective self-report. Participants spontaneously discovered and named phonetic features. These findings contradict the common (usually tacit) assumption that ‘artificial-language’ participants learn only implicitly. Learning mode also affected inductive bias: Implicit learning improved performance on family-resemblance patterns relative to biconditionals (if-and-only-if, exclusive-or) in two experiments. The direction of this effect is unexpected under many current theories of how implicit and explicit concept learning differ, and is consistent with models of explicit learning which take pattern-irrelevant features into account.

The aim of the current study was to compare both incidental and explicit auditory learning of second language derivational morphology by measuring the accuracy and the reaction time of a grammaticality judgment task. Furthermore, the study was set up to examine the nature of acquired knowledge using subjective measures of awareness during the testing phases and postexperimental verbal reports. The delayed effects of learning were investigated by testing participants immediately after the learning and 1 week later also. The results showed a significant learning effect for the incidental and explicit learners immediately after exposure, but only the explicit learners maintained the learning effects a week later. Both types of learners showed no significant difference in the reaction time. Incidental learners primarily developed implicit knowledge, while explicit learners relied on explicit knowledge to a large extent, part of which became unconscious later. The differences of learning under incidental and explicit learning conditions are discussed in terms of the maintenance of knowledge.

This study investigated the extent to which cognitive abilities that involve explicit cognitive processes (i.e., explicit language aptitude) are related to second language (L2) learning outcomes under two corrective feedback conditions. The study followed a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest experimental design. Forty-eight L2 learners of English carried out three oral production tasks, in which their errors on the indefinite article were treated according to their group assignment (i.e., explicit, implicit, and no-feedback). A set of controlled oral production tests was administered as pretest and posttest. Explicit language aptitude was measured using three subtests from the LLAMA Language Aptitude Test battery (Meara, 2005). Results showed that explicit language aptitude predicted immediate posttest performance only under the explicit feedback condition, suggesting that this type of feedback requires mental processes that are facilitated by explicit cognitive abilities and that its short-term effectiveness is not the same for learners with different aptitude levels.