Three measures were found to contribute significantly to the prediction of comprehensibility: mean linguistic depth, the number of self-embedded structures in the sentence, and the number of conjoinging transformations in the derivational history of the sentence. (Author/FB)

Research supported in part by U.S. Public Health Service, National Institute of Mental Health. (DD)

Many factors influence the comprehension of a linguistic act by a listener or reader. Some, such as maturity, background, and interests of the decoder are nonlinguistic; others, such as the vocabulary and complexity of the morphological and syntactical structures are linguistic in nature. A review of the literature reveals that while studies have…

On the basis of the grammatical theory developed by Noam Chomsky, it is reasonable to presume that the different parts of a sentence may not all be understood with equal facility and speed. One purpose of this study was to determine whether some of the grammatical relations within a sentence were understood more readily than others. Sentences of…