Sentence-type variables as aural concept formation dimensions

An aural conjunctive concept formation experiment used as stimuli sentences varying systematically in Voice (active/passive), Mood (declarative/interrogative), Modality (affirmative/negative), tense, and lexical content. Target classes were the eight sentence types defined by all combinations of the first three syntactic variables. Aural processing was more difficult than visual, but higher education level facilitated concept acquisition for males and females equally (cf. Bakeret al., 1973). The 64 undergraduate subjects tended to avoid syntactic analysis in depth, classifying sentences on as cursory a basis as the task allowed. The simple, unequivocal syntactic signals of Mood and Modality meaning were readily apparent, but the discrimination of Voice was complicated by ambiguous syntactosemantic associations and lack of discourse context. Voice is thus not seen as a determinant of utterance type, but as a context- and content-dependent realization of agent or object focus in transitive messages.This report is based on an M.Sc. thesis completed at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada), in 1972