Perception of nonsense passages in relation to amount of information and speech-to-noise ratio.

Attneave has recently pointed out an important correspondence between information distribution and the Gestalt principles of perceptual organization that leads him to interpret the good Gestalt as a figure with high internal redundancy (2). In agreement with this interpretation, an auditory experiment reported by Cherry (3) showed that in simultaneously spoken messages highly redundant verbal groups (cliches) are perceived correctly, even though the messages are otherwise confused. Two learning studies that also bear directly on what is conceptualized here as verbal redundancy are Thorndike's classic experiment on "belongingness" (9) and Guilford's demonstration of the role played by "meaningfulness" (5). The present research was designed to investigate functional relationships between auditory perception and two independently varied speech attributes : the amount of information expressed in the patterning of the speech ("cliche"-edness, "belongingness") and the intensity of the speech