1 - The Effects of Position and Length on Cue Saliency in Article-Noun Agreement of an Artificial Language

Abstract

We created a faux language where each word was embedded with a cue that pointed to which article (out of three) correctly paired with each word. There were six cues with differing lengths placed in different parts of the words in order to test the cue saliency in second language acquisition. Our team put together a list of 30 faux words along with their corresponding articles and their English definition in a powerpoint slide and allowed the research participants to view the slide show exactly three times. They then were given a written test where they were provided with the list of faux words and were asked to match the words with their corresponding article and definition.

After reviewing our results, we found no significant correlation between cue accuracy and word accuracy. Therefore, we concluded that memorization did not play a role in the tests that were run because we would’ve seen a positive correlation between the number of correct cues and the number of correctly matched definitions.

After analyzing the data, we decided against running a test on length because the scatter-plots between lengths were very similar, suggesting that the length of the cue is not playing a significant role in whether or not participants recognize the cue pattern; position seemed a more promising application of the twenty-eight data sets that were obtained.

While our data currently does not show length playing a role in the saliency of cues, it is possible that results will differ with further testing.