Words vs Phrases in a Verbal Guessing Game

Abstract

Recently, Battig (1957) used a word guessing game to study verbal problem solving. The task involved in this game was to find a particular word by guessing at the letters composing it. S is told the number of letters in the word and when he correctly, the position of that letter in the word is indicated. A subsidiary finding of the experiment suggested that performance improved as the length of the word to be guessed increased. The present experiment was initiated to investigate the hypothesis that phrases would be guessed more easily than words, if the average number of guesses required to find each letter in a word or phrase is taken as the criterion. Lists of 4-, 5-, and 6-letter words were drawn up containing 10 words in each list and with no letters repeated in any one word. From these lists, with the sole addition of 'a', 'an', 'as', 'in', 'is', and 'the' where appropriate, a list of 10 phrases containing 100 letters to be guessed, was made. A second parallel set of material was also produced. Ss were 24 first-year psychology students, randomly assigned to four groups. Sets A and B were presented to two groups each, in two orders, i.e., 4-, 5-, and 6-letter words then phrases to one group, phrases followed by 4-, 5-, and then 6-letter words to the other group. The results of an analysis of variance carried out on the data, yielded no significant interaction effects and showed that differences in solving 4-, 5-, and 6-letter words and phrases were all highly significant, all being of the order of 1% or beyond. Phrases are guessed more easily than all other stimulus sets and 6-letter words are guessed more readily than 4-letter words. At first sight, this finding suggests that, when material becomes meaningful, performance is better. The further finding that 6-letter words are also guessed more easily than 4-letter words, suggests that this is not the whole answer. A simpler explanation and one which avoids the thorny problem of 'meaning' might be to suggest, in terms of communication theory, that it is simply a matter of increasing the 'bulk' of the message and hence the 'redundancy,' so overcoming the 'noise' effects of what was designed to be an inefficient channel.