Effects of Feedback Availability Upon Generation of Left- and Right-Branching Sentence Structures

Abstract

It was reasoned that the capacity of short-term memory places limitations upon the syntactic structures produced by the human speaker, but that such limitations would be compensated for if the encoder had a continuous record (feedback) of his production during the creation of a sentence. Accordingly, this experiment involved having subjects create left-branching and right-branching sentence patterns (the former presumed to impose more demands upon short-term memory than the latter) under typewriting conditions where feedback was either available or was denied. Results indicated that although left-branching took relatively more processing time than right-branching, the anticipated interaction with feedback conditions was not realized. Moreover, in terms of error-rate, it was found that right-branching, rather than the predicted left-branching, was facilitated by the presence of feedback.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Duncan, D.B. ( 1955). Multiple range and multiple F tests. Biometrics, 11, 1.

Forster, K.I. ( 1966). Left-to-right processes in the construction of sentences . J. verb. Learn. verb. Behav., 5, 285.

Martin, E. and Roberts, K. ( 1966). Grammatical factors in sentence retention. J. verb. Learn. verb. Behav., 5, 211.

Mehler, J. ( 1965). Sentence production. In G. Miller (Ed.), Semiannual Technical Report (July-Dec., 1964). Center for Cognitive Studies, Harvard University , 25.

Melton, A. ( 1963). Implications of a short-term memory for a general theory of memory. J. verb. Learn. verb. Behav., 2, 1.

Miller, G. ( 1956). The magical number seven plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychol. Rev. , 63, 81.

Miller, G. and Chomsky, N. ( 1963). Finitary models of language users. In R. Luce, R. Bush and E. Galanter (Eds.), Handbook of Mathematical Psychology (New York ), vol. 2, 419.

Osgood, C. ( 1957). Motivational dynamics in language behavior. In M. Jones (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (Lincoln, Nebraska).

Osgood, C. ( 1963). On understanding and creating sentences. Amer. Psychol., 18, 735.

10.

Siegel, S. ( 1956). Nonparametric Statistics (New York).

11.

Sundene, B. ( 1966). Factors Affecting Syntactic Performance. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Wisconsin.

12.

Tannenbaum, P. , Williams, F. and Wood, B. ( 1967). Hesitation phenomena and related encoding characteristics in speech and typewriting. Language and Speech, 10, 203.

13.

Yngve, V. ( 1960). A model and an hypothesis for language structure . Proc. of the Amer. Phil. Soc., 104, 444.

14.

Yngve, V. ( 1961). The depth hypothesis. Proc. of Sympos. in Appl. Mathem., 12, 130.