Facilitation in recognizing pairs of words: evidence of a dependence between retrieval operations.

Two experiments are reported in which 5s were presented two strings of letters simultaneously, with one string displayed visually above the other. In Exp. I, 5s responded "yes" if both strings were words, otherwise responding "no." In Exp. II, 5s responded "same" if the two strings were either both words or both nonwords, otherwise responding "different." "Yes" responses and "same" responses were faster for pairs of commonly associated words than for pairs of unassociated words. "Same" responses were slowest for pairs of nonwords. "No" responses were faster when the top string in the display was a nonword, whereas "different" responses were faster when the top string was a word. The results of both experiments support a retrieval model involving a dependence between separate successive decisions about whether each of the two strings is a word. Possible mechanisms that underlie this dependence are discussed.

[1]  Edward Mack McCormick.  Digital Computer Primer , 1959 .

[2]  W. A. Bousfield,et al.  THE CONNECTICUT FREE ASSOCIATIONAL NORMS: STUDIES ON THE MEDIATION OF VERBAL BEHAVIOR. , 1961 .

[3]  B. J. Winer.  Statistical Principles in Experimental Design , 1992 .

[4]  R. C. Oldfield.  Things, Words and the Brain* , 1966, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology.

[5]  H. Kucera,et al.  Computational analysis of present-day American English , 1967 .

[6]  Richard C. Atkinson,et al.  Search and retrieval processes in long-term memory , 1968 .

[7]  Thomas K. Landauer,et al.  Information retrieval from long-term memory: Category size and recognition time , 1968 .

[8]  M. Ross Quillian,et al.  Retrieval time from semantic memory , 1969 .

[9]  B. Schaeffer,et al.  Semantic similarity and the comparison of word meanings. , 1969 .

[10]  S. Sternberg.  Memory-scanning: mental processes revealed by reaction-time experiments. , 1969, American scientist.

[11]  B. Schaeffer,et al.  The comparison of word meanings. , 1970 .

[12]  Donald A. Norman,et al.  Comments on the information structure of memory , 1970 .

[13]  Delos D. Wickens,et al.  Preprocessing on the Basis of Frequency of Occurrence , 1970 .

[14]  D. Meyer.  On the representation and retrieval of stored semantic information , 1970 .

[15]  H. Rubenstein,et al.  Homographic entries in the internal lexicon , 1970 .

[16]  Allan Collins,et al.  Facilitating retrieval from semantic memory: The effect of repeating part of an inference , 1970 .

[17]  R. E. Warren,et al.  Stimulus encoding and memory. , 1972 .