Quote:Volunteers were given an instruction sheet telling them to “create a ‘document’ by filling three pages with fake, meaningless text in a ‘language’ that you make up as you go. Ideally, this ‘language’ should not actually mean anything, but should appear realistic enough that most observers would not be able to distinguish it from a real language they simply did not know.
I assume that each of the experimentees tried in his own way to give meaning to the task set. By sense is meant the spontaneous development of a system that transforms the text from random to non-random. That this text can nevertheless be linguistically meaningless has already been shown by @degaskell. In this context, it would be interesting to know whether the texts vary in their randomness across the pages, i.e., perhaps are more random at the beginning and then become less and less random.
As for the system: it would be conceivable for a experimentee to think up meaningful sentences and then rephrase them into meaningless "sentences." In this way, he / she would not run out of ideas and could produce something that sounds like a text. Of course, this is only one possibility.
Unfortunately, it is not known how much time the experimentees had for execution and whether a scratch paper was also allowed to be prescribed.