The present paper examines the relationship between explicit and implicit memory and ultimate attainment in the native language. Two groups of native speakers of English with different levels of academic attainment (i.e., high vs. low) took part in three language tasks which assessed grammar, vocabulary and collocational knowledge, as well as phonological short-term memory (assessed using a forward digit-span task), explicit associative memory (assessed using a paired-associates task) and implicit memory (assessed using a deterministic serial reaction time task). Results revealed (...) strong relationships between phonological short-term memory and explicit associative memory on the one hand and the three language tasks on the other hand, and no relation between linguistic performance and implicit memory. Taken together, these results cast doubts on the common assumption that L1 grammar learning depends almost entirely on implicit memory and align with the claims of usage-based models of language acquisition that grammatical and lexical knowledge depend on the same cognitive mechanisms. (shrink)

A cultural change occurred roughly 40,000 years ago. For the first time, there was evidence of belief in unseen agents and an afterlife. Before this time, humans did not show widespread evidence of being able to think about objects, persons, and other agents that they had not been in close contact with. I argue that one can explain this transition by appealing to a population increase resulting in greater exoteric (inter-group) communication. The increase in exoteric communication triggered the actualization of (...) a dormant potential for greater syntactic computational power; specifically it triggered syntactic movement. Syntactic movement, in turn, made possible variable binding, which crucially figures into cognition by description, a naturalistic analogue of Russell’s knowledge by description. Cognition by description made possible the ability to conceive of things one had never experienced, such as mythological beings, places only visited by the dead, and so forth. The Amazonian Pirahã provide some corroboration for this hypothesis, since they exhibit the combination of traits here attributed to Middle Paleolithic individuals, namely exclusively esoteric (intra-group) communication, evident lack of syntactic movement, and a limitation to knowledge (cognition) by acquaintance. (shrink)