Open AccessOBSERVATIONS WITH SELF‐EMBEDDED SENTENCES USING WRITTEN AIDS 1
Author(s) -
Freedle Roy,
Craun Marlys
Publication year - 1969
Publication title -
ets research bulletin series
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2333-8504
pISSN - 0424-6144
DOI - 10.1002/j.2333-8504.1969.tb00401.x
Subject(s) - subject (documents) , verb , object (grammar) , meaning (existential) , linguistics , contrast (vision) , computer science , syntactic structure , natural language processing , syntax , artificial intelligence , psychology , philosophy , library science , psychotherapist
Self‐embedded sentences of any degree beyond one are permitted by the syntactic rules of English, yet previous studies report that subjects typically reject these sentences as being ungrammatical and, in addition, often cannot recover the meaning of these sentences. The present paper investigated the possibility of introducing specially structured self‐embedded sentences as “aids” to the discovery of the structure of more complex self‐embedded sentences. The group of subjects who received these aids performed significantly better in discovering the subject‐verb and subject‐object assignments in the complex sentences (many achieved perfect scores) in contrast to subjects who did not initially receive these aids (these latter subjects obtained close to the minimum possible scores).