Three variables were assessed for their impact upon listeners' structuring of sentences. There were significant main effects found for short term memory (STM) capacity, the meaningfulness of the stimulus and age. An interaction between STM capacity and meaningfulness approached significance when data were collapsed over both age levels and was significant for one age level. Deep-structure variables were held constant in this experiment while the meaningfulness of each item was determined by surface level characteristics. Results indicated that subjects were influenced by the semantic variable, suggesting that surface level phenomena may have some independent influence on sentence structuring.
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