Grammaticalness and meaningfulness in the comprehension of sentences

Abstract

Comprehension of deviant sentences was studied in two experiments. The within sentence variables investigated were grammaticalness (G), meaningfulness (M), word frequency (F), interword association (A), and syntactic frame (Sf). In Experiment I, a principal components analysis of ratings of sentence comprehensibility yielded factors interpretable as ungrammaticalness, nonmeaningfulness, and comprehensibility. In Experiment II, the latencies for Ss to understand the sentences were primarily a function of M and, to a lesser extent, G. The time needed to correct the grammar of the sentences was a function of both G and M, and the time to correct the meaning was a function of M. In both experiments, the effects of F, A, and Sf were either small or insignificant.