Abstract
A technique for measuring minor differences in the intelligibility of words in context was developed and used to measure the effect of violations of syntactic and semantic structure on intelligibility. Hypothetical analyses of English were drawn from transformational grammar and from analytic philosophy. These hypotheses about linguistic competence were converted to hypotheses about which one of a pair of sentences containing the same test word was more acceptable or “grammatical.” The average signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) at which the test word could just be recognized was found for each sentence. The difference between the S/N of the “good” and “bad” sentences in a pair was compared with the results from a questionnaire that asked for differential judgements of acceptability. In general, semantic violations did not affect intelligibility while grammatical violations did. Results are categorized according to the type of syntactic and semantic violation.
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