Differences between formal constraints on a generative grammar and concepts of efficiency in transforming sentences provide different expectations regarding performance measures if the grammar is taken as a psychologically "real" model. To contrast these views, subjects were given sentences varying… read more
A concept-formation study was run using sets of sentences in eight different syntactic patterns as target categories. These were based on all possible combinations of voice (active or passive), mood (declarative or interrogative), and modality (affirmative or negative). Subjects were 32 senior high… read more
This paper reports a brief summary of the results of an extensive investigation of five common English inflections, utilizing a methodology largely borrowed from Jean Berko. A total of 112 subjects were tested, ranging in age from 3 through 9 years, using a fully representative set of real (both… read more
This paper approaches the question of whether the styles of different prose genres (here referring to classifications such as fiction, newspaper reportage, learned journals, etc.) are partially characterized by differences in the co-variation of a number of common syntactic structures.Thirty-six… read more
The syntactic distinction between deep and surface structure ambiguity (MacKay & Bever, 1967) is challenged on theoretical and empirical grounds. It is argued that both types of ambiguity can be resolved at the level of surface syntactic structure, contrary to the MacKay & Bever hypothesis that the… read more
Three sentence families were constructed and the semantic relations among themembers of each family were investigated experimentally. A scaling technique was developed to allow subjects to evaluate the degree of semantic similarity between each pair of sentences in each family. It was found that… read more