Having, at least for the time being, seemingly depleted the PsycInfo database of all articles that relate to my senior research topic, I decided to go in a slightly different direction for finding an article to write about for this, my final Exploring the Field blog entry of the semester. The senior comprehensive project is most probably the largest and most involved project that I'll do at Allegheny, and for every major project that I do, I try to relate it to my aspirations to become an elementary teacher. I managed to find the article, Verbal Learning as a Function of Grammatical Structure by Sheela Singh, from way back in our bicentennial year of 1976. This study provided me with some strong connections between my research topic and my hopeful career field.
Essentially, this study examined the effect of the placement of nonsense syllables in a sentence-like structure on a participant's ability to recall the nonsense syllables. This was based off of findings from previous studies that suggested that just associating independent, isolated nonsense words with other words was not an ideal method of memorization. Also, other studies have found that participants find similarly nonsensical words to have more meaning when the words are placed in a sentence-like structure. Interestingly, Singh decided to study the effects not just of the placement of nonsense words into sentences, but also of the level of "grammatical signals" in the sentence into which the words were placed. Unfortunately, the author/experimenter never elaborates on the idea of "grammatical signals," and no descriptive definition of the term is ever provided. The only mention of them is in the part of the article wherein Singh declares her expectations that participants will be able to recall all of the nonsense syllables more easily (that is, with a few number of trials) when they are placed in a "sentence structure with [a] low level of grammatical signals" than when they are simply listed in isolation. Furthermore, she expected that "nonsense syllables in [a] sentence structure with [a] high level of grammatical signals" will be more easily recalled than those put into a structure with fewer grammatical signals. It is in this distinction between high and low levels of grammar that this article most closely relates to my research project.
After the data was collected and analyzed, it was found that both of the abovementioned hypotheses were supported. Participants who were given nonsense words in sentence structures with high levels of grammatical signals required significantly fewer trials to correctly recall all of them. On the other hand, participants who were simply given lists of isolated nonsense words required the most trials, and those in the low levels of grammatical signals category fell in between. These findings provide evidence to support my idea to incorporate varying levels of grammaticality into my study. Also, although the results of this study suggest that good grammar is important in terms of comprehension and memorization, and not impression formation as in my study, it still makes the general point that the grammar of a piece of written communication affects how it is read in important ways. This is important information to keep in mind as a future educator of young children.
The article can be located with the information in the following citation:
Singh, S. (1976). Verbal learning as a function of grammatical structure. Psycho-lingua, 6(1 & 2), 1-6.
Comments (1)
If you want to broaden your scope on grammatical issues in general, you should consider exploring the syntax literature in psycholinguistics. You should also explore the literature on writing (maybe reading?) in psycholinguistics. Each of these is a huge literature that explores how we develop these skills and how we process this activities in the mind/brain. As a school teacher, you could benefit from learning a little about how we conceive of language processing in terms of spoken comprehension & production vs. writing and reading.
Posted by Prof Knupsky | April 28, 2009 8:57 AM
Posted on April 28, 2009 08:57