rba@allegra.UUCP (09/19/83)
I just came across the following abstract and I thought net.cog-eng readers would be interested. It is an abstract for a paper by A.G. Hauptman and B.F. Green in \Behaviour and Information Technology/ vol 2 #2, 163-178. An experiment compared three man-machine language interfaces to the same interactive computer program: command language, menu selection and natural language. No significant differences were found bewteen language modes for time, error and attitude measures. Significant task differences were found for word and line counts as well as for several two-way interactions. The results suggest that the interface to the program (natural language, menu selection or commands) may not be as important as the structure and constraints of the underlying language.