Abstract
George A. Miller said that human beings have only seven chunks in short-term memory, plus or minus two. We counted the num- ber of bunsetsus (phrases) whose modifiees are undetermined in each step of an analysis of the dependency structure of Japanese sentences, and which therefore must be stored in short-term memory. The num- ber was roughly less than nine, the upper bound of seven plus or minus two. We also obtained similar results with English sentences under the assumption that human beings recognize a series of words, such as a noun phrase (NP), as a unit. This indicates that if we assume that the human cognitive units in Japanese and English are bunsetsu and NP respectively, analysis will support Miller’s 7 ± 2 theory.
A chunk is a cognitive unit of information.
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Murata, M., Uchimoto, K., Ma, Q., Isahara, H. (2001). Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two: Syntactic Structure Recognition in Japanese and English Sentences. In: Gelbukh, A. (eds) Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. CICLing 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2004. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44686-9_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44686-9_4
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