Date of Award
8-1985
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
Psychology
First Advisor
Dr. E. Jack Asher
Second Advisor
Dr. John Nangle
Third Advisor
Dr. Dale Brethower
Access Setting
Masters Thesis-Open Access
Abstract
An experiment was conducted to verify the existence and determine the magnitude of the human response latency differential between words and their abbreviations in a decoding task. Forty-eight Naval Officer Candidates learned a set of abbreviations obtained from operational aircraft cockpits. Abbreviations and corresponding words were divided into easy and hard difficulty levels. Subjects responded by saying the correct whole-word for both stimulus types. Response times measured by a voice key revealed a mean of 0.534 seconds for words and 0.662 seconds for abbreviations. An analysis of variance produced significant main effects (p < .05) for stimulus types and difficulty levels; the interaction effect was not significant. Also, t-tests for correlated scores revealed significant differences (p < .05) between difficulty levels within stimulus types.
Recommended Citation
Piccione, Frances, "The Effect of Word Abbreviation on Decoding Speed and Accuracy" (1985). Masters Theses. 1392.
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/masters_theses/1392