In this post, we’ll be digging into some of the science of language as it applies to verbal questions. Our examples are drawn from official practice questions released by the College Board for the new Digital SAT, but the issues discussed here apply equally to the ACT, as well as to tests like the GRE and GMAT. Our focus today is on so-called function words (and inflectional endings, which the brain treats in the same way). These elements are crucial to grammar and meaning, but are strangely slippery; test-makers exploit this property to lay traps for those reading carelessly or “using their ear” to choose an answer.
As quickly as you can, count how many fs appear in the following sentence:
The falafel stuffed full of fava beans is one of the perennial fan favorites from this fantastic restaurant full of so much fabulous food.
How many did you count?
Was it 13?
…Go count again.
Still 13?
Nope: there are 16 fs in that sentence!
If you’re one of the majority who count thirteen occurrences, it’s because you’re systematically missing the ones that occur in the word of. This word is a function word (another example is a/an), and contrasts with content words like most nouns, verbs and adjectives.
Several factors contribute to the effect demonstrated above. First, it is known that the brain reacts differently to function and content words, having better perception and recall of the content words than the function words, which are often “adjusted” in perception and recall. Second, there is an effect here specific to reading, which naturally proceeds in a series of jumps between only a few points of fixation on any line of text. Generally, the fixation points are content words, and function words are in the periphery, adding to the difficulties in perceiving them accurately (or counting their fs…). Finally, it’s significant that the f in of is not pronounced like fs elsewhere.
This strange blind spot for function words really matters for standardized tests! Little words like these are slippery: they’re easy to misread, and they fade or get distorted quickly in memory even if you read them right. But function words are crucial to both grammar and meaning and inserting or deleting one will often make the difference between getting a question right and getting it wrong.
Have a look at the following official SAT question (spoiler alert: this comes from Blue Book Practice Test 6):
Long attributed to Jacques-Louis David, the preeminent Neoclassical painter of his day, the 1801 painting Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes gained fresh attention in the 1990s when art historians discovered that the painting––which depicts a solitary young woman sketching––was actually the work of little-known French portrait _ Marie-Denise Villers (1774-1821).
Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?
A. artist––
B. artist
C. artist:
D. artist,
A surprising number of even my sharpest students insert an a before little-known — I had them read it out loud, and heard them say it. Thinking that word is there, they choose (D).
…was actually the work of a little-known French portrait artist, Marie-Denise Villers…
The right answer is actually (B):
…was actually the work of little-known French portrait artist Marie-Denise Villers… Going further, it’s also known that the brain treats function words indistinguishably from inflectional affixes like -s, ‘s, -ed, -ing, and so on; they’re part of the same category. These endings, too, are easily missed, interpolated or confused. Here’s an example from another official SAT practice test (Blue Book test 1):
Researchers studying the “terra cotta army,” the thousands of life-size statues of warriors found interred near the tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huang of China, were shocked to realize that the shape of each statue’s ears, like the shape of each person’s ears, __ unique.
Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?
A. are
B. is
C. were
D. have been
If you landed on A or C, you’re in the majority. However, the answer here is actually B. Let’s break down what’s going on in this example. At the point we are asked to choose a verb form (these auxiliary verbs are all function words too!), we have to find the proper noun–in this case, shape. But it’s known that nouns that occur closer to the verb (in this case, ears) can interfere with this process and trigger incorrect agreement. In fact, this one is particularly tricky because the proper, farther-away noun is singular, while some of the distractors in the way are plural: this configuration is known to be more likely to trigger the interference effect. Even worse, while the distractor ears is concrete. the correct noun shape is abstract, which makes it relatively harder to retrieve from memory.
Understanding why these questions are tricky is helpful in itself. But what practical measures can we use to not fall into these scientifically-crafted linguistic traps? On a narrow level, there is a simple procedure to attack agreement questions like the above. There will typically be some quite complex noun phrase, and getting the question right relies on correctly identifying the so-called head noun. This will be the noun that is the central concept, and whether it is singular or plural determines whether the whole phrase counts as singular or plural. There’s a straightforward way to identify the head noun: go through the nouns in the phrase and try saying “COMPLEX-PHRASE is a kind of NOUN”. There will be one noun that clearly sounds right in this frame; the rest will sound wrong. Let’s try it:
the shape of each statue’s ears, like the shape of each person’s ears,…is a kind of______
ears? X
statue? X
shape? √
As soon as we hit shape, it should be clear that we’ve found the head noun. Having found it, mentally put it right next to the verbs in the answers:
A. shape are X
B. shape is √
C. shape were X
D. shape have been X
Needless to say, that’s a one-off solution to a specialized kind of question. There’s a lot more to say about how to engage the kind of precision in reading necessary to beat the hardest verbal questions, on the SAT and other tests. In an upcoming post, we’ll get deeper into the science of language comprehension as it applies to test-taking.