Magical number seven plus or minus two: Syntactic structure recognition in Japanese and english sentences

Abstract

George A. Miller said that human beings have only seven chunks in short-term memory, plus or minus two. We counted the number 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 number 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. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2001.