Re: Noun-Verb vs Verb-Noun

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Article #268

#268

From: Bill Ogden
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 1990 17:29

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Jackson (1983) compaired performance of users of verb-noun
commands (e.g "Find the VW ads") to users of noun-verb
commands (e.g. "VW ads find") and found that despite the
naturalness of the verb-noun syntax, there was very litte
difference between the two groups.  This was true for both
experienced and novice users.  This suggests that the experience 
using natural English does not transfer to learning and using a
computer command language.  It also suggests that the experience 
of using a verb-noun computer languages (which matched the UNIX
experience of the experienced group) does not negatively transfer
to learning and using a noun-verb language.  Jackson further
found that users often left out important parts of their commands
(e.g "VW find" vs "VW ads find"), suggesting that semantic 
restrictions are harder for people to learn than syntactic ones.

Reference: Jackson, M. (1983) Constrained languages need not constrain
person/computer interaction. SIGCHI Bulletin, 15(2-3), pp. 18-22.   

Bill Ogden
Computing Research Lab
New Mexico State U.
ogden@nmsu.edu

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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!attcan!uunet!bu.edu!snorkelwacker!mintaka!yale!cmcl2!lanl!nmsu!opus!ogden
From: ogden@nmsu.edu (Bill Ogden)
Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng
Subject: Re: Noun-Verb vs Verb-Noun
Message-ID: <OGDEN.90Jul18112959@aigyptos.nmsu.edu>
Date: 18 Jul 90 17:29:59 GMT
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In-reply-to: seah@ee.rochester.edu's message of 16 Jul 90 21:46:44 GMT

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