Abstract
Kodama reported on the effects of meaningfulness of a command name on the learning command language and its performance. This paper discusses the importance of the position of the verb in a command string, and the advantages of the mother language over an English-like command language.
A personal computer game was created in which a command language controls a robot. Two command sets were prepared for the experiment; prefix notation command set E is in Japanese and has verbs on top of each command string, and command set F in English version of E. Ten Japanese novices played the game repeatedly, and the game program recorded their typing data throughout the game.
As for the results, the mean leading time needed to start inputting a command string (latency) was significantly shorter for prefix notation command set E and command set F than for postfix notation command set A, which was discussed in Kodama. The processing time for E and F was also much shorter than for A, and there was not a significant difference between sets E and F. Although in terms of typing rate set F (alphabet) was significantly faster than set E (hiragana-characters), in terms of the mean time needed to input a command string (duration) there was also not a significant difference between sets E and F.
