Aural Perception of Sentences of Different Syntactic Structures and Lengths

Eleven sets of 16 sentences, previously rated as natural English statements, were presented to two groups of listeners. Each set of sentences differed in syntactic structure and contained four sentences of each of four lengths: 8, 10, 12, and 14 words. The listeners heard the sentences either under a fixed condition of filtering or without filtering; their task was to write as much of each sentence as possible immediately after it was presented. The sentences were scored for the number of words correctly reproduced, and differences in aural perception among the various sentence types and lengths were tested on the basis of the derived intelligibility scores. The results of the study indicated that (1) perception of the sentences was affected by their syntactic structure and varied, depending upon the grammatical complexity of the statements as specified by a generative grammar; (2) the sentences of 12 words were more easily perceived than were the sentences of the other lengths; (3) no relationship was established between the relative perception of the various sentence structures and their degree of naturalhess.