Transformations and the Understanding of Sentences

Abstract

Five seconds after hearing a simple affirmative sentence that was either active or passive, subjects were asked a question about the sentence. The question was sometimes in the active and sometimes the passive voice. It was found that when both sentence and question had the same voice fewer errors were made than when there was a syntactic mismatch. Furthermore in the matched conditions there was no difference between the active and the passive voice. This was interpreted as evidence that subjects did not transform the sentences after hearing them, for had they done so the passive questions might have been consistently more difficult, and perhaps also the passive sentences. The greater difficulty observed when the voice of the question differed from that of the sentence was attributed to subjects having to make transformations in this situation. If forcing people to make transformations results in more errors, this also suggests that people do not normally carry out such processing as an integral part of understanding sentences. Analysis was carried out of the errors made on different parts of the sentence, but no clear interpretation of this data was possible. The verb was seen to be closely related to the grammatical subject of the sentence, which is to be expected if the sentences were not being transformed. But fewer errors were made when the correct answer was the agent of the verb. This might have been the effect of a specific question form.