Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two: Syntactic Structure Recognition in Japanese and English Sentences

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  • MURATA MASAKI
    Communications Research Laboratory, Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications
  • UCHIMOTO KIYOTAKA
    Communications Research Laboratory, Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications
  • MA QING
    Communications Research Laboratory, Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications
  • ISAHARA HITOSHI
    Communications Research Laboratory, Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications

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  • 日本語文と英語文における統語構造認識とマジカルナンバー7±2
  • ニホンゴブン ト エイゴブン ニ オケル トウゴ コウゾウ ニンシキ ト マジカルナンバー 7 2

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Abstract

George A. Miller insisted that human beings have only seven chunks in short term memory plus or minus two. We counted the number of bunsetsus whose modifiees were not recognized in each step when investigating the dependencies from the beginning of Japanese sentences by using the Kyoto University corpus, and we report that the number was roughly lower than nine, the upper bound of seven plus or minus two. We also investigated English sentences, and we got a result similar to Japanese when we assumed that human beings recognize a series of words such as a noun phrase (NP) as a unit. This indicates that if we assume that human beings' cognitive unit in Japanese and English are bunsetsu and NP respectively, we can accept Miller's theory.

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