Examples of nonsense word

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Performance on the nonsense words was also close to ceiling : 92 % correct for familiar referents and 95 % correct for unfamiliar referents.
Table 1 indicates the pseudo-homonyms, nonsense words and referents for each set.
The nonsense words were counterbalanced across children in their assignments within each pair of object sets.
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.
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.
Some items involved nonsense words, whereas others made use of real words.
Nonsense words allow us to examine stem and derived forms with essentially no frequency and no semantic representation.
Following demonstration and practice, the children were to respond by changing the nonsense words into nonsense words that began (initial) or ended (final) with /k/.
Prior to each session (syllable group), the children were given two practice lists each comprising six unrelated words and nonsense words.
If children can generalize their knowledge of the individual suffixes, whatever pattern obtains for the real words should also be apparent in the nonsense words.
To children, many real words may have been nonsense words, resulting in a similar suffix-based strategy.
Experiments 1 and 2 compared the production of three-mora, three-syllable and three-mora, two-syllable real, and nonsense words.
Nonsense words were not accepted, but names, conjugations and plurals were allowed.
Children from all four age groups made fewer contextually based interpretations of homonymous words than of nonsense words.
The longer response times seen only in seven-year-olds, when correctly interpreting pseudo-homonyms versus nonsense words, may reflect this emerging awareness and its associated indecision.
This is certainly one reason why the most common method for studying acquisition of adjectives has been laboratory studies that use nonsense words.
The word referents were labelled with one-syllable nonsense words with recorded voice prompts.
Unlike experiment one, however, this experiment suggests that children do experience more difficulty mapping verb homonyms as compared with nonsense words.
Reliance on context was sufficient, but not necessary, for interpreting unfamiliar nonsense words, a task with mild demand.
However, recognition memory for real words and for nonsense words was normal and there was no impairment in recognizing or naming famous faces.
It was a frenetically crazy patter song with a refrain of nonsense words supplied by the composer.
However, the pattern of performance on the nonsense words was similar to the pattern produced by children on all words.
Nonsense words were matched to real words on number of phonemes, number of syllables, and stem stress patterns.
Experiment 2 used a similar design, except that the children spelled nonsense words rather than real words.
The fact that this pattern was obtained with the nonsense words suggests a robust influence of the suffixes.
The percentage of nonsense words read correctly was used as the dependent variable for purposes of analysis.
Half of the children in each reading age group received blocked presentation of the nonsense words and half received unblocked (mixed) presentation.
We can conclude that children in each of the four age groups are able to use context, because they succeeded in interpreting nonsense words.
T-tests show that this is entirely due to the differences between performances on the pseudo-homonyms and the nonsense words.
The story incorporated one of 3 word types : pseudohomonyms, nonsense words and familiar words (used correctly).
This was accomplished by having identical referents to which the pseudo-homonyms and nonsense words referred, in different sets of stories.
A different pattern of age differences was seen for the interpretations of nonsense words.
A study based on homonyms and nonsense words with unfamiliar referents would contribute additional information regarding these alternatives.
Recall scores for story segments containing nonsense words.
The aim of the practice lists was to familiarize children with nonsense words and with the computerized presentation of the experiment.
Nonsense words do not have the benefit of being stored as whole words in memory, which was reflected in the poorer performance on nonsense words relative to the real words.
The number of cues recalled from a story about a keyword did not differ across appropriately versus inappropriately interpreted homonyms, but did differ across appropriately versus inappropriately interpreted nonsense words.
This type of conflict with the referent labels was present for the pseudo-homonym and nonsense words in the study, but it does not occur for familiar, accurately used words.
As this task of disambiguation is made easier for the language learner, the gap between their performances in learning nonsense words as compared with learning homonyms correspondingly decreases.
Perhaps the conflict with referent labels accounts for the longer response times for both pseudo-homonyms and nonsense words, relative to the response time for accurately used words.
Learners are able to identify the phoneme correctly in familiar words, but in unfamiliar or nonsense words, success in identifying the phoneme seems to correlate with proficiency.
If derived word frequency was solely responsible for the differences in stress production, we should have seen much worse performance on the nonsense words than we actually observed.
That is, the more difficulty a dyslexic child had in responding correctly to rapidly successive nonverbal auditory stimuli, the more difficulty they had in reading nonsense words.
A maximum of six correct responses each was possible for pseudohomonyms and nonsense words, and a maximum of four correct responses was possible for familiar words used accurately.
Concerning the third hypothesis, we found that children's performance at mapping pseudohomonyms in the verb condition was statistically indistinguishable from their success at mapping nonsense words.
If children are treating the nonsense words in the same way they treat real words, then one would expect that early-learned nouns would also be extended throughout superordinate categories.
The next question to be addressed was whether findings comparable to those described for nonsense words, above, would be found for recall for story segments containing pseudo-homonyms.
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