title: Unconscious structural knowledge of tonal symmetry: Tang poetry redefines limits of implicit learning.
abstract: 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 (chunks) 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.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Shan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.forename: Lei
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.forename: Xiuyan
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Guo
authors.forename: Wendy
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Ma
authors.forename: Zhiliang
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Zoltan
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Dienes
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002681:China; D003243:Consciousness; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D046709:Pattern Recognition, Physiological; D011037:Poetry as Topic; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D013061:Speech Acoustics