Effects of linguistic context on the durations of syntactic categories

Abstract

Miller and Isard [J. Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior (1963)] showed that when subjects are required to shadow grammatical, anomalous, and ungrammatical sentences, percent correct shadowing increased as a function of the presence of syntactic and semantic constraints in the materials. These perceptual results suggest that production of speech may also be differentially affected by the degree to which syntactic and semantic information is used by the talker. In the present study, subjects read grammatical, anomalous, and ungrammatical sentences presented in isolation. Measurements of word length were then made for six different syntactic categories. Results show that for all categories, except nouns, words in grammatical sentences were shorter than the same words in either anomalous or ungrammatical sentences and that words in anomalous sentences were shorter than the same words in ungrammatical sentences. Nouns remained constant in duration across all three sentence contexts. Results from passages of c...