Effects of Grammatical Information on Word Predictability
Percy H. Tannenbaum, Frederick Williams, Ruth Anne Clark · Journal of Communication · 1969
The purpose of this investigation was to determine whether providing a respondent with the designation of the grammatical form class of words deleted from prose contexts would affect his performance in a word prediction task. Word replacements were obtained under conditions where such designations were or were not provided. The results were analyzed in terms of whether response words corresponded in grammatical form class with deleted items (FC-score), as well as in terms of verbatim replacement of items (V-score). As anticipated, grammatical information did result in a greater FC-score as compared with the absence of such information, although this was greater for function-type words (articles, prepositions, auxiliaries, etc.) than for semantic-types (nouns, verbs, adjectives). As for verbatim replacement, grammatical information led to increased V-score only in the case of function-type words, as compared with the alternative condition of no information. These results were thought to be compatible with expectations based upon differences in the numbers of words belonging to the various form classes, as well as expectations regarding the effect of grammatical information upon contextual constraint.