DEFINING THE KNOWLEDGE UNITS OF A SYNTHETIC LANGUAGE - COMMENT ON VOKEY AND BROOKS (1992)

Vokey and Brooks (1992) reported a set of experiments intended to demo nstrate that judgments of grammaticality are determined by two charact eristics of the test items: their similarity with a specific study ite m and their conformity with an abstract representation of the generati ve grammar. I argue that both effects may be encompassed within a unif ied account, which requires neither a specific-item retrieval process nor an abstractive capacity. My basic assumption is that the primary k nowledge units are not whole strings of letters, as postulated in mode ls relying on specific similarity or abstraction, but rather fragments of 2 or 3 letters. Partial memorization of these small units provides a convenient account of the whole pattern of Vokey and Brooks's findi ngs because study items have more units in common with similar than wi th dissimilar test items, and likewise with grammatical than with ungr ammatical ones.