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Transformations. I. The effect of DAF on sentence generation
Abstract
A hypothesis based on the psycholinguistic derivation of sentences was tested. The task required that sentences temporarily stored in memory be transformed and spoken with delayed auditory feedback. An instruction to repeat the stimulus sentence verbatim or grammatically transform it was placed either immediately before or immediately after the sentence. Two measures of interference were obtained based on the syllable rates for the response times. The different grammatical forms showed significant variation in the amount of interference, but the amount of interference appeared to relate primarily to the length of the transformed sentence rather than to its derivational complexity. Interaction between the position of the instruction and the sentence generation task is discussed in terms of the underlying memory functions involved. A further test was proposed.
This study tested the hypothesized relationship between the rules of sentence transformation and preresponse processing time in a short-term memory and transformation task. The transform instruction was placed either before or after the stimulus sentence, and verbal responses were made with immediate or delayed auditory feedback. The data showed conclusively that the amount of processing required by different grammatical transformations does not relate, to the theoretical linguistic derivation, even when transformations are grouped into an ordinal ranking of difficulty rated by the number of nominal transform rules required. An instruction prefix facilitates information processing and interacts with the grammatical task. Sentence generation was retarded significantly by the imminent onset of delayed auditory feedback. This effect of imminentDAF appears to be a new finding.
This experiment investigated the possibility that autistic adolescents may avoid speech communication with the world around them by "tuning out" or perceptually suppressing auditory speech stimuli. The tune-out auditory suppression hypothesis was investigated using the subject's own speech as the stimulus under three perceptual-motor conditions: with speech in a delayed auditory feedback (DAF) mode, with a white noise masking speech mode, and with speech in a normal, quiet listening mode. Five autistic adolescents were compared with six normal controls on speech time duration and sound level. DAF increased the speech sound pressure level (SPL) and increased speech time duration for both groups.
An experiment is described which investigates the effects of irrelevant digits interpolated into a list of letters presented for recall. The main result is that when an irrelevant digit follows the final recall item there is a massive serial position effect, with later items in the list being affected more than earlier items. This corresponds to stimulus suffix effects reported by other authors and differs from response prefix effects where no differential serial position effects are noted. It is concluded that the two effects must be ascribed to two different kinds of store, one post-recognition, and one prerecognition store.
A system for precategorical storage of acoustic information is described. Material in this store is subject to overwriting
and to decay with time. Precategorical Acoustic Storage (PAS) receives information only from the ears; it is not affected
by silent rehearsal or by visual stimulation, and is explicitly distinguished from storage in terms of articulation. Two experiments
are reported in which these properties of PAS are tested. Postulation of PAS permits an account of serial position functions
for visual and auditory presentation in immediate memory, a distinction between “recency” and “flnality” effects, the differential
effects of a redundant prefix and a redundant suffix, effects of vocalization at presentation and at recall, and the relation
between memory confusions and speech perception. Implications for a general theory of human memory are discussed.
Conducted 17 experiments with adult ss (n = 383) using stimulus suffix effect (sse) to determine the properties of the precategorical acoustic store (pas) described by R. Crowder and J. Morton (see pa, vol. 43:15225). The sse is described as a selective impairment of recall of the final items in a serial recall list engendered by a redundant acoustic event following acoustic presentation. It is established that such intrinsic properties of the suffix as its meaning, frequency of occurrence, and emotionality have no bearing on the size of the suffix effect. This confirms the precategorical nature of the store. It is also shown that variation in the acoustic properties of the suffix (e.g., its apparent spatial location, timbre, and pitch) with respect to the stimuli reduces the size of the sse. Variations on this theme indicate that pas is located after a mechanism of selection between acoustic channels and before the convergence of acoustic and visual analysis systems. (33 ref.)
A model is presented for the limitations of processing information by the human operator which proposes that he acts not as a limited capacity channel with fixed capacity, but as a limited capacity processor. The total capacity of the brain can be allocated to the separate aspects of the tasks, such as reception, recording, emission, storing, etc. Hence from moment to moment the size of the ‘channel’ in the Shannon sense will appear to vary. In particular parallel processing is possible where the total capacity is not exceeded, and where there is high compatibility. Experimental evidence in support of the model is presented.
This paper proposes a taxonomy of information-processing tasks. Information conserving, reducing, and creating operations are viewed as different methods of processing. The main concern of this paper is information reduction which, it is suggested, represents a kind of thinking in which the solution is in some way implicit in the problem, but in which the input information must be reflected in a reduced or condensed output. A number of tasks within the areas of concept identification and utilization are shown to have this character. If the tasks require complete representation of the stimulus in the response (condensation) the amount of information reduced is directly related to difficulty both during learning and in utilization of previously learned rules. If the tasks allow Ss to ignore information in the stimulus (gating) the direct relation between reduction and difficulty is found during learning but may not occur after the rule is learned.
The effect of eight syntactic structures in conjunction with four levels of sidetone and three levels of noise, on the duration and loudness of sentences was measured. Three different populations of readers were used. In terms of both measures, delayed sidetone and different sentence-types significantly affected oral reading. In all circumstances a kernel sentence was affected least by the speech-retarding variables. Negative and query sentences, which uniformly contain more rather than fewer transformational nodes (in the tree-diagram system) were more adversely affected than kernel sentences. There was a striking similarity between the outcome of sidetone and noise with respect to the effects of sentence structure.
Written primarily for students and research workers in the area of the behavioral sciences, this book is meant to provide a text and comprehensive reference source on statistical principles underlying experimental design. Particular emphasis is given to those designs that are likely to prove useful in research in the behavioral sciences. The book primarily emphasizes the logical basis of principles underlying designs for experiments rather than mathematical derivations associated with relevant sampling distributions. The topics selected for inclusion are those covered in courses taught by the author during the past several years. Students in these courses have widely varying backgrounds in mathematics and come primarily from the fields of psychology, education, economics, sociology, and industrial engineering. It has been the intention of the author to keep the book at a readability level appropriate for students having a mathematical background equivalent to freshman college algebra. From experience with those sections of the book which have been used as text material in dittoed form, there is evidence to indicate that, in large measure, the desired readability level has been attained. Admittedly, however, there are some sections in the book where this readability goal has not been achieved. The first course in design, as taught by the author, has as a prerequisite a basic course in statistical inference. The contents of Chaps. 1 and 2 review the highlights of what is included in the prerequisite material. These chapters are not meant to provide the reader with a first exposure to these topics. They are intended to provide a review of terminology and notation for the concepts which are more fully developed in later chapters. By no means is all the material included in the book covered in a one semester course. In a course of this length, the author has included Chaps. 3, 4, parts of 5, 6, parts of 7, parts of 10, and parts of 11. Chapters 8 through 11 were written to be somewhat independent of each other. Hence one may read, with understanding, in these chapters without undue reference to material in the others. In general, the discussion of principles, interpretations of illustrative examples, and computational procedures are included in successive sections within the same chapter. However, to facilitate the use of the book as a reference source, this procedure is not followed in Chaps. 5 and 6. Basic principles associated with a large class of designs for factorial experiments are discussed in Chap. 5. Detailed illustrative examples of these designs are presented in Chap. 6. For teaching purposes, the author includes relevant material from Chap. 6 with the corresponding material in Chap. 5. Selected topics from Chaps. 7 through 11 have formed the basis for a second course in experimental design. Relatively complete tables for sampling distributions of statistics used in the analysis of experimental designs are included in the Appendix. Ample references to source materials having mathematical proofs for the principles stated in the text are provided. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Demonstrated that R. Conrad and A. J. Hull's (see 42:6) comparison of serial recall for the visual and auditory modalities involves a confounding of opportunities for strategic rehearsal. Ss were 24 undergraduates and university staff. Results, using written monitoring to control rehearsal, were interpreted within the framework of pluralistic coding and storage models advanced by R. G. Crowder and J. Morton (see 43:11). Evidence suggests that the act of vocalizing during a visual presentation preempts strategic rehearsal. An adequate modality comparison was defined for further investigation. (18 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
RESULTS ARE PRESENTED WHICH CONFIRM THOSE OF M. C. CORBALLIS (SEE 40:6) AND D. J. MURRAY (SEE 40:6). THESE SHOW THAT WHEN A SEQUENCE OF LETTERS OR DIGITS IS PRESENTED FOR IMMEDIATE RECALL, THERE IS A MARKED DIFFERENCE IN THE SERIAL POSITION CURVE OF ERRORS ACCORDING TO WHETHER PRESENTATION IS AUDITORY OR VISUAL. THIS DIFFERENCE SPECIFICALLY SHOWS AS A VIRTUAL ABSENCE OF RECENCY IN THE VISUAL PRESENTATION CONDITION. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The experiment tests a hypothesis based on limited capacity under conditions of normal and delayed auditory feedback. Three predictions are tested on reading material in which syntax and coherent meaning are introduced as separate constraints. The hypothesis predicts that the difference between normal and delayed speech rates will be inversely related to the redundancy of the material but that the ratio of delayed/normal readings will remain constant across the passages since this measure also takes account of reading speed. A third measure, based on a selective analysis of speech disturbances, also confirms a prediction that the likelihood of speech disturbances increase throughout a sentence unit. The effects of delayed feedback are briefly discussed within the context of two recent models of information processing.
It was suggested that feedback information for monitoring speech should be more important the tighter the intra- or inter-segment dependencies in a speech task, and thus the more automatized the task. Hence the impairing effects of delayed auditory feedback (DAF) should be greater the tighter such dependencies. In order to test this suggestion two experiments were conducted. In Experiment I the Stroop color-word interference test was used, and it was found that DAF impaired performance on a difficult and novel task (naming tints against color names) significantly less than on an easy overlearned task (reading color names), whereas external interference in a control group—hearing someone else's voice—had no differential effect on the two tasks. In Experiment II, which required the reading of numbers arranged in sequence and at random, it was found that DAF impaired performance significantly more on the first task where there was a high degree of inter-item dependency than on the second task where there were no inter-item dependencies. Thus in each experiment performance on the more automatized of the two tasks suffered more under DAF.
Various grammatical features of English sentences—negative and passive transformations, and others—are encoded in immediate memory apart from one another, and apart from the rest of the sentence. The evidence for this claim is that sentences having these features require a larger part of the capacity of immediate memory than do otherwise identical sentences lacking these same features. The amount of memory capacity required by each sentence was measured by seeing how much additional material could be remembered along with it.
The recall of English sentences varying systematically in syntactic structure was studied by the method of prompted recall with 80 Ss. Analysis of the errors indicated that most of them were due to syntactical confusions. The hypothesis is advanced that Ss analyze the sentences into a semantic component plus syntactic corrections when they learn them, and that this separation of semantic content from syntactic form is one reason that the general meaning of a message is generally so much easier to recall than its exact wording.
Three experiments are reported on the partial report of material presented auditorily over three spatially different channels. When partial report was required by spatial location, it was superior to whole report if the cue came less than four seconds after the end of the stimuli (Exp. I). When partial report was required by semantic category (letters/digits) the relation between it and whole report depended on whether the S was asked also to attribute each item to its correct spatial location. When location was required partial report was lower than whole report and showed no significant decay with delay of the partial report indicator (Exp. II), but when location was not required, partial report was superior to whole report for indicator delays of less than two seconds (Exp. III). This superiority was, however, much less than that found in Exp. I when partial report was required by spatial location. These results are compatible with a store which has a useful life of around two seconds and from which material may be retrieved more easily by spatial location than by semantic category.
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First published in 1958, this book has become recognized as a classic in its field. It marked a transition between behaviourist learning theory and the modern 'information processing' or 'cognitive' approach to perception and communication skills. It continues to provide a principal starting point for theoretical and experimental work on selective attention. As Professor Posner writes in his Foreword to the reissue: 'it remains of great interest to view the work in its original form and to ponder those creative moments when the mind first grasps a new insight and then struggles to work out its consequences.
Noam Chomsky's first book on syntactic structures is one of the first serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of scientific theory-construction a comprehensive theory of language which may be understood in the same sense that a chemical, biological theory is understood by experts in those fields. It is not a mere reorganization of the data into a new kind of library catalogue, nor another specualtive philosophy about the nature of man and language, but rather a rigorus explication of our intuitions about our language in terms of an overt axiom system, the theorems derivable from it, explicit results which may be compared with new data and other intuitions, all based plainly on an overt theory of the internal structure of languages; and it may well provide an opportunity for the application of explicity measures of simplicity to decide preference of one form over another form of grammar.
In this paper, three aspects of the role of memory in information processing have been considered. Retention of images, preservation of verbal information over brief periods, and reactivation of material from long term store represent different senses in which the term STM has been used. The assumption that all of these involve a single system may be fruitful for some purposes, but may also lead to inappropriate generalizations. For example, it does not appear that imagery need be short term or that reactivated information is especially susceptible to interference. Nevertheless, a considerable amount is now known about each of these systems and both comparisons and contrasts may prove useful.
This paper is a review of efforts to extend the use of information techniques to tasks which are intellectual in nature. Complex tasks such as problem solving and concept formation are viewed in terms of simpler processes of information transformations and immediate memory. The first section of the paper considers efforts to describe the difficulty of transformations such as occur in arithmetic operations and concept utilization in terms of their informational parameters. The second part considers the relationship of these transformations to tasks which require retention. The final section extends the analysis to the complex sequential tasks of induction, problem solving and reading. The paper as a whole may be considered as a quantitative extension of the view of thinking as skilled performance (Bartlett, 1958).
Some effects of grammatical transformations on the recall of English sentences Where is capacity limited? A survey and a model Attention and Performance
- J Mehler
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Perception and Communication Decision and Stress Syntactic Structures
- D E Broadbent
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