Path: 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: Date: 18 Jul 90 17:29:59 GMT References: <1990Jul16.214644.3009@ee.rochester.edu> Sender: news@NMSU.edu Organization: NMSU Computer Science Lines: 22 In-reply-to: seah@ee.rochester.edu's message of 16 Jul 90 21:46:44 GMT 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