PHRASE UNITS AND THE RECALL OF GRAMMATICALLY STRUCTURED NONSENSE
Peter Herriot · British Journal of Psychology · 1967
Inflexions and function words were added to nonsense stems to form strings fitting three different sentence frames. These strings were then divided into phrase units, and also into units of the same size but with the inter‐unit boundaries not occurring at the phrase boundaries. Other conditions introduced the randomization of the order of the units, and also of the nonsense stems within units. Results, in terms of the number of trials to criterion, showed that there was a significant difference between the two groups learning the strings in the correct order, one in phrase units and the other in non‐phrase units; there was also a significant order effect, the strings with stems randomized being harder to learn than the strings with units randomized and the ordered strings. When transitional error probabilities were calculated, it was found, contrary to expectation, that error probabilities were higher between the non‐phrase units than between the phrase units. It was concluded that phrase units are basic in the recall of sentences, and that the sequential organization of stems is most important within phrase units.