Experimental Study of Cognitive Function of Generating Elliptical Sentences in Planimetric Tasks

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the study of the cognitive function associated with the generation of elliptical sentences in the Russian language. The study is conducted by testing this cognitive ability using a computer system specially developed by the authors for this purpose. Testing of this cognitive ability is proposed and implemented for the first time. The system is an extension of Moodle and is openly hosted in the github repository. Elliptical constructions are limited to verbal and nominal ellipses, which are theoretically possible to be completely reconstructed based on the context of the sentence. The study is conducted with the participation of SPbPU students as respondents. The texts of planimetric tasks are chosen as the subject area. As a result of the analysis of testing data, the following results are obtained: the influence of the respondent’s knowledge of the subject area (planimetry) on the test results is established; a tendency towards self-study of respondents was discovered, which is manifested in a reduction in time and an increase in scores as they pass tests; it is shown that respondents are poorly motivated if they do not see feedback on the answer to the completed task. The paper discusses the problems of further development of the testing system and its use in adapting questionnaires (tasks) to assess the knowledge of SPbPU students in the field of automation of bug detection in programs, as well as for diagnosing the functional state of operator specialists and express diagnosis of dementia. It also seems promising to use the system to improve the processes of syntactic parsing of elliptic sentences and automate the restoration of ellipses in the subject area of planimetry.