A comparison of ordinary, anomalous and scrambled word strings

Four kinds of word strings were heard behind masking noise in a speech-perception experiment. There were ordinary sentences (strings), semantically anomalous “sentences” (strings) and scrambled versions of each, called scrambled ordinary and scrambled anomalous strings. Words were systematically erased from each string such that string length varied from one to (all) five principal words, making a 4-string types × 5-string lengths design. All strings were rated by other S s on scales of meaningfulness or grammaticality. Some results were: (a) ordinary sentences were heard better through noise and rated as more grammatical and as more meaningful; (b) for all three measures the ordinary-string scores diminished relatively less or not at all as a function of increasing string length; and (c) the anomalous strings were rated as more grammatical than the scrambled ordinary strings, but the scrambled ordinary strings were rated more meaningful and were heard relatively better.