Abstract
This study tested the hypothesized relationship between the rules of sentence transformation and preresponse processing time in a short-term memory and transformation task. The transform instruction was placed either before or after the stimulus sentence, and verbal responses were made with immediate or delayed auditory feedback. The data showed conclusively that the amount of processing required by different grammatical transformations does not relate, to the theoretical linguistic derivation, even when transformations are grouped into an ordinal ranking of difficulty rated by the number of nominal transform rules required. An instruction prefix facilitates information processing and interacts with the grammatical task. Sentence generation was retarded significantly by the imminent onset of delayed auditory feedback. This effect of “imminentDAF” appears to be a new finding.
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Salter, D. Transformations. II. Latency of generation. J Psycholinguist Res 5, 33–42 (1976). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01067946
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01067946