Grammar as motor sequence learning

Abstract

Human grammar is an evolutionary product, operated by the procedural memory system. The procedural memory system is said to be responsible for learning serial motor tasks as well as grammar of a language (Ullman, 2000). The objective of the present study was to explore the relationship between Serial Reaction Time (SRT) task - a sequence learning task and grammatical judgment – a grammar knowledge task. The results showed that the scores on inflectional morphology tasks correlated r with sequence learning scores in comparison to the scores on derivational morphology tasks. The results are discussed with reference to the relation between sequence learning and grammar knowledge suggesting that learning grammar in the domain of language is an implicit skill that is akin to serial motor learning in the domain of ions of the findings with reference to the special population of children with SLI are discussed in the paper.