Explicitness of Declarative Chunks

[Jerry.Ball at williams.af.mil]

I would like to argue that at least with respect to language processing,
knowledge of language is pretty much implicit. That is, although we can be
taught that such and such a word is a noun or a verb, such explicit
knowledge of grammatical categories does not come into play in language
processing for native speakers of a language. My own experience with a
second language, where I was explicitly taught the grammar of the language,
was that I never got very good at the language so long as I relied on such
explicit knowledge.

I do not share the more extreme view that there is some independent language
processing module, although this would explain the implicitness of language
knowledge. However, I am grappling with the issue of how this implicit
knowledge of language maps onto ACT-R's distinction between declarative and
procedural knowledge. My current thinking is that knowledge about the
grammatical categories of words should be declarative, but implicit... 

Jerry

-----Original Message-----
From: Frank E. Ritter [mailto:ritter at ist.psu.edu]
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2001 9:40 AM
To: Troy Kelley; Jerry.Ball at williams.af.mil
Cc: act-r-users at andrew.cmu.edu
Subject: Re: Explicitness of Declarative Chunks


A very good book in this area is Ericsson and Simon's Verbal Protocol 
Analysis.  It is essentially a theory of how and what people can talk 
about, and how they do it.  It is worth getting in hardcover, if you 
can, because it is very useful.

Cheers,

Frank

At 10:25 -0500 14/12/01, Troy Kelley wrote:
>Jerry,
>
>First, it is good to see someone posting to the ACT-R list.  I think you
>might want to look at the literature and see if any there are any
>experiments which look at just what people are aware of as explicit
>knowledge and what they are not aware of.  This seems to be a pretty good
>question for a few experiments because, off the top of my head, I don't
>think many people have looked at what "explicit knowledge" constitutes and
>what it excludes.  There is some evidence, from knowledge elicitation while
>developing expert systems, that experts are not completely aware of their
>knowledge, but I don't think anyone has really looked at this in any great
>detail, i.e. *exactly what* are they not aware of, and why they not aware
>of some things, but aware of other bits of their knowledge.  Theoretically,
>to carry this a step further, I have some trouble with the notion that
>people are completely unaware of procedural knowledge.  Sure it is
>difficult to explain how to ride a bike, but that is because it is a motor
>skill, and motor skills might not translate into words as easily as
>something more cognitive, like playing chess for example.  I think if you
>force people to think about what they know, more and more of the knowlege
>comes out.  I am not sure if the simple fact that some things are difficult
>to talk about, and difficult to quantify, perhaps because someone has never
>had to talk about some aspect of their expertise before, that this
>necessarily means that this knowledge is somehow unavailable or not
>explicit.
>
>These are interesting questions though, and a good area for research.
>
>Troy Kelley
>Army Research Laboratory
>
>
>
>
>
>
>Jerry.Ball at williams.af.mil on 12/13/2001 02:59:20 PM
>
>
>
>
>
>To:    act-r-users/@andrew.cmu.edu
>cc:
>Subject:    Explicitness of Declarative Chunks
>
>
>It has been suggested that declarative chunks are explicit in that humans
>are consciously aware of the contents of declarative chunks and can reflect
>on their content.  However, it is not clear to me that the "type" of a
>declarative chunk is something that can necessarily be reflected on. Thus,
>if a human has a declarative chunk type  "ISA noun", it is not necessarily
>the case that the human can reflect on that type. Humans may know that
>words
>belong to various categories without explicitly being able to reflect on
>what those categories are. If, on the other hand, the Part of Speech of a
>word is encoded in a slot with the type of the declarative chunk being
>something like "ISA word", then the same argument holds for the slot
>containing the POS.
>
>For example, given
>
>(man isa noun
>    word man)
>
>or
>
>  (man isa word
>      word-form "man"
>      word-root man
>      word-type noun)
>
>Although the type "noun" is encoded in the declarative chunks, knowledge of
>the type "noun" remains implicit.
>
>Jerry


-- 

Frank  Ritter at ist.psu.edu 
School of Information Sciences and Technology
The Pennsylvania State University
004 Thomas (Basement)
University Park, PA  16801-3857
ph.  (814) 865-4453   fax (814) 865-6426
http://ritter.ist.psu.edu