Human Factors and Behavioral Science: On Abbreviating Command Names

Abstract

Test subjects' abbreviations of command names and randomly selected English words were examined for production regularities. Abbreviation rules based primarily on a word's number of syllables were devised to capture regularities observed in people's productions. This rule set was compared to two simpler abbreviation rules — vowel deletion and truncation. In subsequent learning experiments, separate groups of subjects learned the rule-derived abbreviations for words, while other groups learned the most frequently given abbreviation for each word. Subjects who studied rule-derived abbreviations remembered substantially more of them when prompted with full words than did subjects who studied the most frequently given abbreviations. Moreover, the rule-based abbreviations were superior even for those for which the rule-produced and the most frequently produced abbreviations were identical. When the task was reversed (recall the source term given an abbreviation), performance was best for vowel deletion abbreviations and worst for the rule set abbreviations. We suggest that both memorability of abbreviations and the probability that people will spontaneously produce a “correct” abbreviation are increased by: (1) selecting abbreviations using a vowel deletion rule for one-syllable words and an acronym rule for multiple-word terms, as well as (2) allowing variable length truncations of words.