Transformations. I. The effect of DAF on sentence generation

A hypothesis based on the psycholinguistic derivation of sentences was tested. The task required that sentences temporarily stored in memory be transformed and spoken with delayed auditory feedback. An instruction to repeat the stimulus sentence verbatim or grammatically transform it was placed either immediately before or immediately after the sentence. Two measures of interference were obtained based on the syllable rates for the response times. The different grammatical forms showed significant variation in the amount of interference, but the amount of interference appeared to relate primarily to the length of the transformed sentence rather than to its derivational complexity. Interaction between the position of the instruction and the sentence generation task is discussed in terms of the underlying memory functions involved. A further test was proposed.