Examples of nonsense

Example from the Hansard archive. Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0
Perhaps with the use of artificial, nonsense names children would have restricted the artificial name and not accepted other artificial names for the hybrids.
Since the faces were initially novel to subjects, but the words, inevitably, were familiar, we tested recognition of a list of nonsense words.
Nonsense tokens were used to control for possible interference from lexical frequency effects.
The notion that our moral circle expanded by reciprocity is in many instances ahistorical nonsense.
We feel it when thinking about great and complicated realities, and we also feel it when seriously considering nonsense and contradictory claims as true.
Populist nonsense must give way to popular or unpopular sense ... to scientific sense, whether it is popular or not.
All this nonsense about men having volition and so on!
Following demonstration and practice, the children responded by changing the nonsense words into nonsense words that began (initial) or ended (final) with /k/.
The target words for the vowel study were real and nonsense words associated with specific objects in the room.
Thus, there is no value for n for which such nonsense sentences and non-sentences can be distinguished.
In this study, we found a significant correlation between performance on each tense marker and nonsense word repetition in the children with autism.
A similar pattern was observed across the high-frequency, low-frequency, and nonsense words: performance on -tion forms was best, followed by -ic, then -ity.
A semirandom order was used (so that all eight nonsense words in a given category were seen once before any repeats).
The test words were a mixture of real words and nonsense words respelled in various ways.
We therefore carried out a second experiment in which children were asked to spell unfamiliar nonsense words rather than familiar real words.
As before, children identified the referents of nonsense words 85 % of the time or better.
Although nonsense words are also apparent synonyms, there are no plausible distractors.
The relation between the amount of information recalled by children and the accuracy of their word interpretation was investigated for pseudohomonyms and nonsense words individually.
What is clear is that the pattern of response times differed markedly across pseudo-homonyms and nonsense words, for four-year-olds and seven-year-olds.
The children may have made atypical responses to individual nonsense verbs or item-specific effects might differ across adult and child populations.
Only two of the ten-year-olds made any incorrect responses to nonsense words, so this age group was omitted.
Out of 58 trials using the nonsense words, participants said ' no ' to 23 of them (40 %).
In addition to these, six nonsense words were used for the warm-ups : wongle, bim, speff, lanner, dack, and torvel.
The mutual exclusivity bias would not have competition, and the pseudo-homonym would function much like a nonsense word.
However, fewer children cited context when interpreting pseudohomonyms, relative to children interpreting nonsense words (65 and 77 %, respectively).
In contrast, children from the three older age groups had longer response times for incorrectly vs. correctly interpreted nonsense words.
The present investigation offers an empirical test that provides a quantifiable comparison between the acquisition of homonyms and nonsense words.
Participants need to identify the object to which the nonsense word refers and subsequently identify it on the answer sheet.
A small superiority for syllables emerged only when they substituted nonsense stimuli for the original bisyllabic words.
He is surprised how some people could accept their "nonsense views" (safsata), which are, to him, against physical experiments and observations.
We anticipated that both groups of children would produce a high proportion of regularization responses to regular nonsense verbs.
No nonsense about everything emerging from the programme or from new technologies.
Four-year-olds, on the other hand, showed evidence of indecision when interpreting nonsense words, but less so when interpreting pseudo-homonyms.
However, this effect was seen only among the seven seven-year-olds who made both inaccurate and accurate interpretations of nonsense words across trials.
Only children who made both contextually correct and incorrect responses to nonsense words were included.
Only children who made contextually incorrect responses to pseudo-homonyms and nonsense words were included in this analysis.
There were no significant differences for response times to pseudo-homonyms versus nonsense words for the three remaining age groups.
The nonsense material consisted of either one or two syllables.
Only two children (1 %) correctly recalled all of the nonsense words.
The second graders in this study made many more interpretation errors when interpreting homonymous words than when interpreting unfamiliar, nonsense words.
The second segment's key word was either a pseudo-homonym or a nonsense word.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.