Effects Of Syntax Research Articles

An autonomic reflection of syntactic structure

Subjects heard sentences in one ear during which a brief shock was administered before, in or after the division between two clauses. The galvanic skin response (GSR) to shocks objectively at the end of a clause was larger than the response to shocks at the beginning of a clause. This effect of syntax on GSR was larger for subjects who heard the speech in the right ear. An independent effect was that the GSR to shocks at the end of a clause decreased as a function of clause length; responses to shocks at the beginning of a clause were relatively unaffected by the length of the preceding clause in our stimulus materials.

Some conditions of the influence of syntactical structure on learning: Grammatical transformation, learning instructions, and “chunking”

The effects of syntax on learning were examined in a factorial design which included four factors: Structure, structured and unstructured; syntactical sample, active verb, passive and nominalization; chunking, explicitly specified vs. unspecified; and learning instructions, intentional and incidental. The objectives of the study were (a) to test the generality of previous findings by using a variety of grammatical samples, (b) to determine whether syntactical structure facilitates learning in the absence of intentional learning instructions, and (c) to test the “chunking” hypothesis as an account of the facilitation produced by syntax. The following were the chief findings. The main effects of structure, syntactical sample, and instructions were significant. Structured material was learned better than unstructured material, to the same degree for the three syntactical samples; the latter ranked AV, PA, and NO in order of increasing difficulty. There was a Structure × Instructions interaction. Structured material was easier only when accompanied by intentional learning instructions. The main effect of the chunking variable was not significant. Chunking did interact both with the structure and the instruction variable, but not in a manner that supported the chunking hypothesis.

Human vs machine translation of foreign languages

The translation of technical subject matter demands an extensive knowledge of both languages and a considerable acquaintance with the subject. A computer system to give high-quality translations of serious subjects, spoken or written, would be most useful, but neither the cerebral logic used in translation nor the semantic structure of language itself is yet understood. The memory storage required for machine translation may not be a serious obstacle, but the linguistic task of quantifying the effects of syntax and context upon meaning may prove to be insurmountable.