THE INTERACTION BETWEEN SYNTACTIC COMPLEXITY AND SEMANTIC REFERENCE IN ACQUISITION OF A MINIATURE ARTIFICIAL LANGUAGE
Hiroshi Nagata · Japanese Psychological Research · 1977
An experiment on a miniature artificial language was designed to examine an interaction between levels of syntactic complexity and presence or absence of semantic referents each word of a sentence referred to. The results showed a clear interaction between them: If syntax was low in complexity, syntax acquisition of subjects not given semantic referents did not differ from that of subjects given them, whereas if it was high, syntax acquisition of the former subjects was significantly inferior to that of the latter subjects. These results were interpreted as to suggest that syntactic and semantic or referential aspects of experiencing contexts work together in acquiring structures of language.