The psychological reality of phrase-structure rules

Abstract

The experiment was designed to determine the extent to which adult Ss would use their knowledge of grammar to break a sentence into functional subunits as they attempt to learn it. The Ss learned eight sentences, as responses to digits, in a PA task. Their responses were scored for the conditional probability that the words in the sentences were wrong, given that the immediately preceding word was right. It was assumed that these probabilities measured the extent to which adjacent words were independent events during learning. Words from the same functional subunit should be dependent events and those from different subunits should be relatively independent of one another. If Ss break the sentences into subunits using their grammar, the conditional probability of an error should be high between subunits and low within subunits. The results indicated that the conditional probabilities were predictable from the linguistic structure of the sentences.