Implicit and explicit modes of learning: similarities and differences from a developmental perspective

Abstract

The article reports on a series of studies designed to test for similarities and differences between the implicit and explicit learning of categories and rules in children and adults. First, the distinction between implicit, nonconscious and automatic learning processes on the one hand, and explicit hypotheses testing and problem solving on the other hand is briefly introduced. While explicit learning processes have been shown to develop rather late, preschool children appear as capable as adults when implicitly inducing the formal morphophonological and syntactic regularities of complexly structured input. This is empirically shown by using miniature languages within an implicit learning context. Over and above these studies show that not only explicit but also implicit learning is highly dependent on input structure. Specifically, children and adults succeeded in learning more complex morphophonological regularities and formal word categories if and only if the input contained additional cues to structure that covaried with word categories and rules. In addition, this result is extended to the learning of visual-conceptual categories and rules. When explicit and implicit modes of learning were compared, implicit, but not explicit learning turned out to be highly “modality specific”, i.e., correlated phonological cues (but not visual-conceptual ones) facilitated the implicit learning of morphophonological rules and categories, while visual-conceptual cues promoted the learning of visual-conceptual categories and rules. Contrary to implicit learning, explicit learning is comparatively more focused on visual-conceptual cues and regularities. The results of the miniature language studies are discussed and related to natural bidirectional interactions between cognitive-conceptual development on the one hand, and lexical and formal-language development on the other.

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