Effect of Translation and Transformation on Recognition of Sentences

Summary.-The sentence search-recognition procedure described by Miller (3) was used to test for an interaction between the recognition of transformed and translated sentences. The interaction did not appear if the task included English-active sentences. This result suggests the possibiliry that translation and transformation are processed by different systems. Miller (3) found that, when sentences were transformed from one syntactic form to another, for example, active to passive, Ss took longer to find them in a list of sentences than if they were identical. The search-recognition time increased as the number of syntactic changes increased. Thus, the features of structural description were reflected in behavior and their interrelation measured behaviorally (1, Ch. 5). Translation within a texr from one language to the other, however, did not slow the covert reading of FrenchEnglish bilinguals (2). The present experiment was performed to determine whether the sentence search-recognition procedure will show a delay for translation and second, whether translation and transformation interact to increase recognition time. An interaction suggests that the processes of translation and transformation are somehow related and that semantic and syntactic properties of sentences are monitored by the same or overlapping systems. Sixteen English speakers who had lived in France and spoken French for at least a semester served as Ss. They received $8.00 on the completion of the task. The basic sentences to be recognized were the same ones used by Miller (3) and consisted of the 18 combinations of three subjects, two verbs, and three objects. The four sentence types used were English-active example"^^^^ TAUGHT THE SMALL BOY"), English-passive (example--"THE SMALL BOY WAS TAUGHT BY JANE"), French-active (example"JEANNE A ENSEIGNE LE PETIT GARCON") and French-passive (example-"LK PETIT GARCON ETAIT ENSEIGNE PAR JEANNE"). On each trial S was given a pair of the lists of 18 sentences. Every list was a different random order of the sentences. There were, on different trials, four pairs of lists of the same sentence form (example-Englishactive/English-active), four list pairs of transformations (example-English-active/ English-passive) , four list pairs of translations (example-English-active/French-active) , and four pairs of lists that were both translated and transformed (example--Englishactive/French-passive). The time S required to match all the sentences in the pairs of lists was recorded by stopwatch. All 16 combinations were presented once for practice. Then, on another day, a reordered 16 pairs of rerandomized lists were presented and these tlmes were analyzed. When S made an error in matching, that pair of lists was presented rerandomized later in the series. Table 1 follows the procedure of Miller (3) and gives the average search-recognition times per sentence by condition. The experimental times are based on the recognition of different sentence forms within pairs of lists without regard to order in the paic. The control times are based on recognition of the same sentence forms within pairs of lists