Verbal Context and the Recall of Meaningful Material

Abstract

Communicative behavior, perhaps more than any of man's other activities, depends upon patterning for its significance and usefulness. An accidental inversion of words or letters or sounds can produce grotesque alterations of a sentence, and to scramble the elements at random is to turn a sensible message into gibberish. No attack upon the problems of verbal behavior will be satisfactory if it does not take quantitative account of the patterns of verbal elements. We can dependably produce and distinguish only a small number of different letters or speech sounds. We must use these few elements to talk about millions of different things and situations. To stretch these few elements to cover these many needs, we are forced to combine the elements into patterns and to assign a different significance to each pattern. Since the number of possible patterns increases exponentially as the length of the pattern increases, this proves to be an efficient method of solving the problem.