Showing papers by "Stephen E. Newstead published in 1976"

Semantic constraints and sentence perception

Abstract: This study investigates semantic constraints in reversible sentences and their relationship to sentence perception. In Expt. I, subjects were given anagrams of reversible sentences to solve, and any preferences for one version of the sentence over the other were taken to indicate the presence of semantic constraints in that sentence. In the second part of the experiment, subjects were presented with these sentences masked with white noise, and there was found to be a relationship between the semantic constraints and the ease of perceiving the sentences. Expts. II and III provide evidence that these constraints derive from a knowledge of the overall relationship expressed in the sentence rather than from the meanings of individual words. Previous experiments have failed to find any effect of semantic constraints in sentence perception; this discrepancy is explained in terms of the strategies subjects might have adopted in the various tasks.