Some discriminative properties of syntactic structures

Abstract

SummaryForty scripts were prepared that contained the same 36 kernel sentences with one of four syntactic structures: declarative, negative, passive, or query. The relative frequency of the structures in each script was varied systematically. Tape recordings of the scripts, read by 40 speakers, were presented to listeners who sorted a (different) set of 144 sentences according to their estimate of which speaker was most likely to have said each sentence. The distribution of syntactic structures in the stimulus scripts was compared with the corresponding distribution arrived at by the listener.When a particular syntactic structure predominated in a speaker's corpus, the listeners tended to assign all the sentences of the dominant form exclusively to that speaker. When the relative frequencies of the syntactic structures in a corpus were more nearly equal, the listeners tended to assign structures at random. Most of the confusions in discrimination, that is, assignment of a structure to a speaker much more often than it was uttered, were associated with the declarative and passive sentence structures. These syntactic forms generalized most often with each other and more often with the remaining syntactic forms than either negative or interrogative sentences.