Effect Of Sentence Length Research Articles

The effect of sentence length on question comprehension in children with cochlear implants

Objectives The present study investigated the comprehension of subject and object who and which questions in children with cochlear implants (CI). Methods Growth Curve Analysis (GCA) was used to compare eye gaze fixations and gaze patterns to the appropriate subject or object nouns within a four-picture array between 16 children with CI and 31 children with typical hearing (aged 7;0-12;0) on wh-questions with and without added adjectives to increase length. Offline accuracy was also compared. Results Findings indicated children with typical hearing exhibited more fixations to the target noun across all conditions, supporting higher comprehension accuracy. Both groups of children demonstrated more fixations to the target noun in object questions and questions without added length. Patterns of eye movement were significantly different between groups, suggesting different patterns of eye gaze across the array before fixation on the target noun. Children with CI exhibited fewer fixations, slower speed to fixation, and differences in gaze patterns that may imply the presence of processing limitations. Error analyses also suggested that children with CI frequently fixated on a picture similar to the target noun. Conclusions Results indicate children with CI comprehend questions more slowly than their hearing peers, which may be related to limitations in working memory.

The Effects of Dysphonic Voice on Speech Intelligibility in Cantonese-Speaking Adults.

Purpose This study aims to investigate the effects of dysphonic voice on speech intelligibility in Cantonese-speaking adults. Method Speech recordings from three speakers with dysphonia secondary to phonotrauma and three speakers with healthy voices were presented to 30 healthy listeners (15 men and 15 women; M age = 22.7 years) under six noise conditions (signal-to-noise ratio [SNR] -10, SNR -5, SNR 0, SNR +5, SNR +10) and quiet conditions. The speech recordings were composed of sentences with five different lengths: five syllables, eight syllables, 10 syllables, 12 syllables, and 15 syllables. The effects of speaker's voice quality, background noise condition, and sentence length on speech intelligibility were examined. Speech intelligibility scores were calculated based on the listener's correct judgment of the number of syllables heard as a percentage of the total syllables in each stimulus. Results Dysphonic voices, as compared to healthy voices, were significantly more affected by background noise. Speech presented with dysphonic voices was significantly less intelligible than speech presented with healthy voices under unfavorable SNR conditions (SNR -10, SNR -5, and SNR 0 conditions). However, there was no sufficient evidence to suggest effects of sentence length on intelligibility, regardless of the speaker's voice quality or the level of background noise. Conclusions This study provides empirical data on the impacts of dysphonic voice on speech intelligibility in Cantonese speakers. The findings highlight the importance of educating the public about the impacts of voice quality and background noise on speech intelligibility and the potential of compensatory strategies that specifically address these barriers. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.13335926.

The effects of sentence length on dependency distance, dependency direction and the implications–Based on a parallel English–Chinese dependency treebank

Dependency distance is closely related to human working memory capacity, but is also influenced by other non-cognitive factors. Studies of dependency distance contribute to the understanding of the universalities and peculiarities of languages as well as human cognitive processes in language. Forty two sentence sets were selected from a parallel English–Chinese dependency treebank to examine the progressive properties of dependency distance with the change of sentence length in the two languages. It was found that: (1) the probability distribution models of dependency distance of both languages are not affected by either sentence length or the type of language; (2) the quantity of adjacent dependencies in the two languages are identical, but the quantity of adjacent dependencies of Chinese fluctuates within a limited range, while that of English shows a falling tendency; (3) the mean dependency distances (MDDs) of Chinese are always higher than those of English, and both MDDs show slight ascending trends; (4) compared with dependency distance, dependency direction is a more reliable metric for language classification. These findings suggest that: (1) the universal cognition mechanism may be the major factor affecting the general traits of dependency distance, while language-related factors such as sentence length may affect certain traits of dependency distance; and (2) Chinese taxes working memory more than English.

Effects of Sentence Length on Word Order Correspondence between Source Language Text and Target Language Text in English-Japanese Translation : Analysis of a Meiji Era English Self-study Book

Effects of Sentence Length on Word Order Correspondence between Source Language Text and Target Language Text in English-Japanese Translation : Analysis of a Meiji Era English Self-study Book

Effect of sentence length and complexity on working memory performance in Hungarian children with specific language impairment (SLI): a cross‐linguistic comparison

English-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) perform more poorly than their typically developing peers in verbal working memory tasks where processing and storage are simultaneously required. Hungarian is a language with a relatively free word order and a rich agglutinative morphology. To examine the effect of linguistic structure on working memory performance. It was examined whether syntactic complexity has a larger impact on working memory performance than sentence length in Hungarian-speaking children, similar to the findings in English speaking children. In Experiment 1, performance accuracy was measured with two linguistic span tasks that included stimuli with varying sentence length and syntactic complexity. Experiment 2 examined the impact of sentence length and morphological complexity on working memory performance. Children with SLI performed more poorly than their age-matched peers in all working memory tasks. Their error patterns differed from those of children with typical language development. Children with SLI produced a high number of interference errors that indicate poor executive functions. The findings were compared with previous results of English-speaking children. Complexity affected working memory performance accuracy differently across languages. In English, it was the increase of syntactic complexity that resulted in a decrease in performance accuracy, whereas in Hungarian, it was the morphological complexity that had a large impact on working memory performance. Working memory performance depends on the linguistic characteristics of the language tested. In both English- and Hungarian-speaking children, complexity has a larger effect on verbal working memory performance than the length of the stimuli. However, complexity affects working memory performance accuracy differently across languages.

VISUAL IMPRINTS ON THE PRISON LANDSCAPE: A STUDY ON THE DECORATIONS IN PRISON CELLS

ABSTRACTWhile conducting my first research project on prisons, I noticed that some prisoners decorated their cells with massive quantities of bathing products and air freshener. I wondered why. This led to an impressionistic study that drew from visits to six young offender institutions and interviews with 11 prisoners in England. Prisoners and staff gave numerous explanations for such decorations, including: the commodification of everyday items, such as shower gels; social status; the creation of a home environment; the need to fill space; boredom; illegal activity; and the effect of sentence length on the personalisation of space. Michel de Certeau's idea of tactics is applied to the findings as mundane activities used by people in a position of weakness. Other visual imprints in the everyday surroundings of prisoners could also have numerous explanations. This study serves as a beginning for future research on the personalisation and meanings of prison spaces.

Effect of focus on verbal working memory: critical role of the focus word in reading.

The effect of focus on working memory was investigated with the reading span test (RST). In two experiments, the span scores and the number of intrusion errors were compared between the focused RST the and the nonfocused RST. Focus word was defined as the most important word for comprehending a sentence. For the focused RST, the target word to be maintained was the focus word for the sentence. In the nonfocused RST, however, the target word was not the focus word for the sentence. The results of both experiments showed that RST span scores were higher for the focused RST than for the nonfocused RST, and intrusion errors were found to increase for the nonfocused RST. In Experiment 2, the effect of focus was compared between high-span and low-span subjects. An effect of sentence length was also investigated. The result showed that low-span subjects were more affected than were high-span subjects by whether the word to be remembered was the focus word. The effect of sentence length was not confirmed. These findings suggest that the low-span subjects had deficits in their ability to establish and/or inhibit mental focus when faced with conflict situations in reading.

Effect of sentence length and exposure on the intelligibility of synthesized speech

This study investigated the effect of the length of sentences and the amount of exposure to synthesized speech on the intelligibility of a popular text-to-speech (TTS) output device. The results show that sentences with a mean word length of 11 words are as intelligible as sentences with a mean length of approximately 5 words. In augmentative and educational applications of TTS output, it appears that relatively long sentences may be used without fear of adverse impact on intelligibility. The study also shows that there is a large and linear increase in intelligibility with exposure to synthesized speech up to the first 5 sentences heard by listeners within an experimental session. Thereafter, there is a less marked and variable amount of increase in intelligibility up to the next 15 sentences heard. Exposure beyond the first 20 sentences does not appear to contribute to increased intelligibility within a session. Exposure to the Echo II synthesizer over a 3-day period showed that subjects improve signifi...

Syntactic analysis of the spontaneous speech of normally fluent and stuttering children

The unrestricted speech of three groups each of stutterers arranged by age and age-matched controls was assessed. Analyses made on utterance length showed that this depended on age group, fluency group, and that age and fluency interacted. The frequency of usage of the various syntactic categories did not differ between the fluency groups though it did depend on the age groups. Examination of the frequency of stutterings for the stutterer groups showed that stuttering varied with syntactic category produced. This was still so after the effects of sentence length and frequency of usage of the syntactic categories were taken out as covariates. Generally speaking the more complex syntactic categories resulted in higher stuttering frequency. This relationship depends on age, with the youngest group showing most dysfluencies on the simpler syntactic categories.

Syntactic transparency and sentence interpretation in aphasia

Abstract A semantic anomaly judgement test was used to test the hypothesis that sentence comprehension errors by agrammatic aphasics arise as a consequence of faulty mapping from syntactic functions to thematic roles. In one condition, anomalies arose out of a thematic role reversal which was carried by the syntactic structure (e.g., # The worm swallowed the bird). Mis-mapping in these cases would have the effect of altering plausibility and hence resulting in erroneous judgments. In a second condition, mismapping was of no consequence (e.g., # The cat divorced the milk). Effects of sentence length (“Padding”) and of the transparency with which thematic roles are syntactically encoded (“Moved-arguments”) were examined across both types of anomaly. Overall, the performance pattern of agrammatics reveals considerable sensitivity to syntactic structure per se. Their difficulty seems to lie in the utilization of syntactic information for the assignment of thematic roles, particularly where the syntactic relationship between the verb and its noun arguments is not transparently evident in surface structure.

The effect of variation in sentence length on young children's attention and comprehension

The effect of sentence length on children's attention and com prehension was studied. Twenty-five two- to five-year-olds were placed into three groups, High, Middle, and Low, based on their mean length of utterance (MLU). Subsequently, each child watched three videotaped stories, each having the same number of words but a different MLU. The time the child spent gazing at the monitor was measured. Comprehension was measured by a picture choice task. Results indicated that the High group attended most to the Long Level, comprehended obvious content best at the Long Level, and comprehended subtle content best at the Medium Level; the Low group attended most to the Medium Level and comprehended little. It was concluded that both input level and child level differentially affect attention and comprehension.

Effects of Sentence Length, Content, and Transformational Form in a Memory Overflow Task

Savin and Perchonock (1965) used a memory-overflow paradigm to investigate sentence memory. For a series of trials, they required subjects to remember a sentence and as many words as possible from a subsequent eight-word string. They found that word recall decreased as the sentences’ transformational complexity increased. Subsequently, Matthews (1968) revealed that the original study had confounded transformational complexity with sentence length, and that the latter was found to produce the memory effects. In the present study, the variables transformational form, sentence length, and number of content words in the sentence (also previously confounded) were manipulated, and the effects of these factors were separated with regression analyses. It was found that the best model, using criteria of prediction and simplicity, was based on content words alone.

A problem of language disorder: length versus structure.

The effects of sentence length and structure on the accuracy of sentence repetition by 13 normal-speaking and 13 language-disordered children were compared. The sentences were from three to five words long and were primarily imperative, active-declarative, negative, and question sentences. All types of three-word sentences were repeated accurately by a greater percentage of language-disordered children than were four- and five-word sentences, but the percentages of children accurately repeating these four- and five-word sentences did not differ significantly. Imperative and active-declarative sentences were repeated accurately by a greater percentage of language-disordered children and with fewer errors than were negative and question sentences. Length and structure had no significant effect on the accuracy of sentence repetition by normal-speaking children. Levels of repetition accuracy varied in the deviant-speaking population, and this appears to have important implications for therapeutic programming.

The effects of sentence length and grammatical structure in a serial learning task

Nonsense strings containing four, five, six, and seven nonsense words were constructed for three grammatical structure conditions: morphology and syntax, morphology alone, and syntax alone. Analysis of the percentage of words recalled revealed a significant learning effect that was inversely related to sentence length. More important, however, was a failure to find any facilitation effects on recall due to morphology and/or syntax.