The role of reference fields in learning of artificial language expressions

Abstract.— The learning of artificial language "sentences" as a function of reference fields in different modalities was studied in a concept formation situation. With verbal sentences a visual reference field was found to be more expedient than a verbal reference field. When the sentences were represented in a visual sign-language form, this effect was reversed, thus revealing an interaction effect between sentence modality and reference field modality. Each sentence contained three nonsense items and was presented together with a contextual reference field. However, the denotative content of the items was not specified in advance. In solving the task, the subjects were thus left free to establish their own relations between the sentence items and the reference fields, instead of having to discover predetermined denotative relations between items and context. The findings were taken to support the notion that concept formation and association formation are basically aspects of the same underlying process.