A Chronometric Study of Some Relations between Sentences

An attempt was made to study how people handle syntactic relations among English sentences by measuring the time required to convert one type of sentence into another. Preliminary results based on rate of work in a pencil-and-paper test are briefly summarized. More detailed data are given for an experiment in which subjects controlled the duration of presentation of the sentence they transformed. Presentation times were measured and compared with the presentation times when no transformation was required; the difference between these times was taken as a measure of the additional time required to perform the transformation. In such tasks, an active-passive difference requires more additional time than does an affirmative-negative difference; when both are involved the additional time required is approximately the sum for the two separately. Differences in verb constructions, however, all require about the same amount of time, and no additive relation is apparent. The relation of these results to the distinction between rules of formation and rules of transformation in descriptive linguistics is discussed.