I understand the confusion and it's why I wasn't quite sure if I'd correctly identified what was happening. I took sentence and word as the music theory terms sentence[1] and motive[2]. Then translating the beats of an example into Kodály syllables seemed like a reasonable exercise that could be objectively evaluated.

[1] https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/mt21c/SentenceStructure.h...

[2] https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/mt21c/MotiveSection.html