An Index to Measure Contingency of English Sentences

Abstract

Several indexes to measure contingency of sentences were constructed by considering nouns, repeated nouns, and total number of words. Contingency was operationally defined as reconstructibility in order to test the several indexes against a criterion.The best form of the index was then selected and retested. The contingency ranking, based on the index, of ten sections of text correlated 0-84 with the reconstructibility ranking. It was concluded that the index is a valid initial approximation to a measure of contingency if contingency is defined as reconstructibiIity.Scholars have been concerned with language as a communicative device for many centuries. More recently, part of this interest has been expressed in statistical analyses of language as evidenced in the counting of word frequencies and the calculation of word contingencies. Newman (1951) investigated patterning of vowels and consonants in various languages and found that there were marked differences in the degree to which sequences of vowels and consonants form a restriction on the informational content of the language, He also found the greatest degree of patterning in primitive languages and least patterning in English. Therefore, in information terms, English is noisy and unpredictable. In English there is little structure beyond the 5th or 6th letter (the length of the average word) perhaps, because the statistics of words are on a different level from the statistics of letters. Newman and Gerstman (1952) developed a coefficient of constraint which provides an estimate of the sequential dependencies of letters. They conclude that " neither greater freedom nor greater constraint is discovered when sequences of letters are examined of a length greater than that of one word " ; and they also suggest that " in many respects, analysis at the level of words would be most useful."Miller, Heise and Lichten (1951) found that a word is harder to understand if it is heard in isolation than if it is heard in a sentence because if one hears the first six words of a sentence, the seventh can more easily be determined €or the range of possible continuations is sharply restricted.This sort of formulation, however, has not been applied to the analysis of sentences. Since the number of possible sentences in English is very large, any estimate of the

Inoculating Against Pro-Plagiarism Justifications: Rational and Affective Strategies

“…Participants were randomly assigned to one of the three treatment conditions and the two attack message conditions. Inoculation and attack messages were evaluated for written comprehension using the Index of Contingency (Becker, Bavelas, & Braden, 1961), a measure that interprets the readability of sentences. With this measurement, lower numbers suggest diversity in language while higher ratings indicate repetition in word choices.…”

Use of inoculation to foster resistance to credit card marketing targeting college students

“…To ensure that messages used as manipulations were similar in terms of readability, attack message and inoculation treatment messages were evaluated for written comprehensibility using the Index of Contingency (Becker, Bavelas, & Braden, 1961). Equivalence among the messages was ascertained; the rating for the attack message was 6.15, whereas ratings for the inoculation pretreatment messages ranged from 6.56 to 6.87.…”

The potential of inoculation in promoting resistance to the effectiveness of comparative advertising messages

“…Total word counts and the Index of Contingency, developed by Becker, Bavelas, and Braden (1961) to gage the comprehensibility of messages, were used to evaluate message equivalence. As Table 1 indicates, the total word counts and the Index of Contingency ratings of the inoculation messages and of their corresponding comparative advertising messages were similar.…”