Meaningfulness and abstractness of so-called nonsense verbal materials

Abstract

The function of wordness of Japanese two-letter syllables (corresponding to English CVC trigrams) was investigated. 111 Ss were forced to classify 200 syllables into one of seven parts of speech (noun, verb, auxiliary verb, adjective, adverb, particle and conjunction). When one part of speech was choiced by more than 56 Ss, we decided the syllable as that part of speech type. There were 64 noun type syllables, 11 verb type, 2 auxiliary verb type, one adjective type, and 2 mixed type (each syllable had a homonym belonging to the different parts of speech, noun and verb). The other 120 syllables could not be classified into a particular part of speech, so we called them as an indefinite type. The classification is printed in Table 5, column 13th.To discriminate the difference of the function of the parts of speech type and the indefinite type, two experiments were run. 3 minutes after classifying task, 111 Ss were instructed to recall as many syllables as possible which were classified into the seven parts of speech. In this incidental recall experiment, the mean number of Ss per syllable who recalled the parts of speech type syllables and the indefinite type syllables, were 7.38 and 2.93 respectively. (Exp. 2, Table 1)Exp. 3 was paired-associate learning. Stimuli were two place digits and responses were two-letter syllables. The two lists used are shown in Table 2. Each list was composed of 8 pairs, four of which were the parts of speech type and the other four were the indefinite type, and in each list, syllables were controlled by non-association value and frequency of occurrence. The mean number of correct anticipation in 20 trials for the parts of speech type and the indefinite type were 16.2 and 12.7 in list A, 14.2 and 11.8 in list B. (Table 2) Each experiment proved that syllables belonging to the parts of speech type were significantly easier to learn than the indefinite type syllables.The mode of number of Ss who choiced one of the parts of speech of a syllable was counted through the 200 syllables, and it was called “Mode”. The Spearman's r's between the Mode and other 11 scales (Imae, 1966), and between the Mode and number of Ss who recalled incidentally the syllable were described in Table 4.The Mode highly correlates to ease of learning and rated meaningfulness, and the mean number of Ss recalled highly correlates to the Mode and the ease of learning.The 64 noun type syllables were divided by 47 Ss into an abstract noun type and a concrete noun type. When 2/3 of Ss selected one alternative, we decided the syllable as the abstract noun type or the concrete noun type, and the other indefinite, and the number of syllables of each type were 19, 31, and 14 respectively. When these syllables were controlled by non-association value and ease of learning, the mean number of Ss incidentally recalled per syllable were more in the concrete noun type syllables than in the abstract noun, (Table 3) This is consisted with the recent studies on the noun abstractness.