Regular Versus Randomized Sentences, Nouns Versus Prepositions, and Assimilation in Salience

Abstract

The authors' research supports an alternative to the theory that organization improves retention by producing fewer elements for processing. College students' recall of randomized words was better for nouns than for prepositions. Regular sentences improved recall, but this improvement was less for nouns than for prepositions. According to the alternative theory, a part assimilates (increases in similarity) to its high-in-salience organization-produced group, thus increases in salience, and hence is retained better. The high-in-salience group for a regular sentence should be the sentence's meaning. Because the nouns were recalled better, they were more similar in salience to the regular sentences' meanings than were the prepositions. Assimilation should be minimal when parts are very similar. Therefore, the nouns' assimilation in salience should have been less than the prepositions', explaining the nouns' less improvement in recall.

Grouping and Assimilation in Perception, Memory, and Conditioning

“…Consequently, the amount of part-to-group assimilation in salience may be less for a noun part than for a preposition part. Thus, relative to the poor retention that a randomized sentence produces, a regular sentence may improve the retention of its noun less than its preposition, as has been confirmed (King & Normington, 1999).…”

Utilização e compreensão de preposições por crianças com distúrbio específico de linguagem

“…This suggests that, even though SLI children have produced in greater proportion the propositions in/on/at and to, which seem to arise earlier in development for being cognitively simpler (Grela et al, 2004) and excessively used by adults (King and Normington, provides subsidies for a more detailed analysis. According to King and Normington (1999), some idiomatic expressions commonly used by adults contain the prepositions in/on/at and to, which, coincidentally, were the most used by SLI children. Thus, while they still seem to be ruled by the use of set phrases, even at 5 years old, typically developing children showed to elaborate phrases based on grammatical/syntactic processing.…”

“…In this way, to learn the appropriate use of prepositions, children would have to be able to memorize the sentences used by the adults and to associate the phrasal structures of these sentences to the characteristics of transitivity of the verbs used and to the cognitive/ semantic relations displayed by them. The complexity of these abilities makes children prefer to use, in the beginning of their development, sentences previously produced by adults, which's use do not demand children's spontaneous elaboration (King and Normington, 1999). Yet, it's necessary to observe if children with SLI keep using these types of sentences for a longer period during their development.…”