When the cognitive process is based on conscious rule application, the symbolic approach is an elegant way to model it. The knowledge structures and algorithms can be made explicit, and perhaps even used to teach such skills to people. It may well be that these tasks turn out to be implemented by subsymbolic processes when we really look, but the subsymbolic properties do not play a significant role in these behaviors. As long as our goal is to understand the behavior, or perhaps replicate it on a computer or other people, the symbolic descriptions are more appropriate than neural. However, there are also processes whose foundations are clearly subsymbolic.
Processing appears effortless and intuitive.
These properties are very difficult to capture in the symbolic framework. It seems that a complete account of linguistic performance will have to include subsymbolic mechanisms. Script processing is a case in point. Any co-occurrence of events forms a basis for a script. Some of them are reinforced more than others and become stronger, other accidental associations die away.