6533b82bfe1ef96bd128d76e

RESEARCH PRODUCT

The use of control groups in artificial grammar learning.

Pierre PerruchetRolf Reber

subject

AdultArtificial grammar learningmedia_common.quotation_subject050109 social psychologyExperimental and Cognitive Psychology050105 experimental psychologyDevelopmental psychologyHumansLearning0501 psychology and cognitive sciencesControl (linguistics)StudentsGeneral Psychologymedia_commonLanguageGrammarGroup (mathematics)Teaching05 social sciencesCognitionControl GroupsImplicit learningTest (assessment)Regression AnalysisGrammaticalityFrancePsychologyCognitive psychology

description

Experimenters assume that participants of an experimental group have learned an artificial grammar if they classify test items with significantly higher accuracy than does a control group without training. The validity of such a comparison, however, depends on an additivity assumption: Learning is superimposed on the action of non-specific variables—for example, repetitions of letters, which modulate the performance of the experimental group and the control group to the same extent. In two experiments we were able to show that this additivity assumption does not hold. Grammaticality classifications in control groups without training (Experiments 1 and 2) depended on non-specific features. There were no such biases in the experimental groups. Control groups with training on randomized strings (Experiment 2) showed fewer biases than did control groups without training. Furthermore, we reanalysed published research and demonstrated that earlier experiments using control groups without training had produced similar biases in control group performances, bolstering the finding that using control groups without training is methodologically unsound.

10.1080/02724980244000297https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12587898