Vertical and Horizontal Constraints in the Context Reading of Sentences

Abstract

Horizontal constraints such as the word class of a word deleted from a passage and vertical constraints, which operate over the distribution of words that can occur at a particular word class deletion, affect the word a subject will supply from his repertoire. Forty upper division college women were administered ten sentences; in each sentence a lexical word was deleted. The subjects were asked to supply all the words they could think of that made sense in each deletion. The study seems to indicate that a skilled reader does receive information from the constraints of the sentences that he reads and that the responses are in some way constrained by the responses he makes while reading. Probably horizontal and vertical constraints are important in the comprehension of competent readers.

Cloze procedure as a memory-search process.

“….). This evident resistance of response order to experimental manipulation is strikingly consonant with the findings of a somewhat similar study by Weaver, Kingston, and Dinnan (1971).…”

“…This finding implies that if, for a given one-semantic-constraint cloze item, potential responses of a given subject are ordered by associative strength (e.g., R 1 , R 2 , …, R n ), then the addition of semantic constraints eliminates certain responses but does not alter the order of the remaining responses (…, R i , R i + j , …). This evident resistance of response order to experimental manipulation is strikingly consonant with the findings of a somewhat similar study by Weaver, Kingston, and Dinnan (1971).…”

Categorization of Paradigmatic Syntagmatic Oral Responses

“…Weaver, Kingston and Dinnan (1971) explored the chaining effect with written stimulus in a written cloze task and found pattern consistencies and various switches controlled by both written and intellectual constraints. Bickley (1971) reported a learning task showed significant differences when the phonological pairing went from lexical to structural for first grade students.…”