Elsevier, Consciousness and Cognition, 4(20), p. 1751-1760, 2011
DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2011.03.003
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We investigated the implicit learning of a linguistically relevant variable (animacy) in a natural language context (namely, the relation of forms of determiners to semantics). Trial by trial subjective measures indicated that exposure to a form-animacy regularity led to unconscious knowledge of that regularity. Under the same conditions, people did not learn about another form-meaning regularity when a linguistically arbitrary variable was used instead of animacy (size relative to a dog). Implicit learning is constrained to acquire unconscious knowledge about features with high prior probabilities of being relevant in that domain.