Users input English sentences, and the program translated it to Japanese and back several times until the sentence stops changing.
(The use of commas suggests that "without her man" can be removed from the sentence without changing the meaning).
The student manages to form one sentence by changing the places of a few phrases.
For the past perfect: "If I had gone to Wal-Mart yesterday, I would have run into an old friend" can be made into a subjunctive sentence by changing the "if I had" to "had I," resulting in: "Had I gone to Wal-Mart yesterday, I would have run into an old friend".
Changes were made within paragraphs, mostly by adding/deleting/modifying individual words or sentences, without changing the overall purpose of the paragraph.
The very ease with which, as a party game, you can substitute "The Tea Party" for "Poujadisme" in certain sentences without changing the meaning very much should be proof that there are certain myths we don't outgrow, even if the signifiers change.
Small silence intervals are left unchanged since they usually occur in continuous sentences and changing them might affect the quality of the speech.
Clemency is actually an umbrella term, encompassing a pardon, the most powerful grant of forgiveness of a crime and a prison sentence; commutation, which means changing a sentence from death to life, and a reprieve, a short stay of sentence for a specified time.
In the post-9-11 era, one has been able to interchange the words "Christian," "conservative," "religious," "right," and "Republican" in one sentence without necessarily changing the meaning of the sentence.
However, it is difficult to envision how our experiment might have caused such a reward effect, given that we changed only the subject of the sentence across the 1stPP and 3rdPP conditions, without fundamentally changing sentence meanings.
