Decisions about whether pairs of letter strings are both words or not are faster for semantically related words than unrelated words. Two experiments showed the semantic relatedness effect is greatly reduced when orthographically illegal, unpronounceable strings were used as negative items. Lexical decisions involve options on codes representing…

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that, when interpreted in context, general terms are typically encoded on the basis of an instantiation. Results indicated that a particular term naming the expected instantiation of a general term was a better cue for recall of a sentence than the general term itself. (CHK)

Four experiments dealt with integration of semantic information while reading. Reading and comprehension time of two related sentences in a text was analyzed according to their proximity and relation within the text. A model of textual comprehension is proposed. (CHK)

Research supported by contracts of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, Department of Defense, with the Human Performance Center, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan. (RS)

Listeners shadowed lists of words or parts of sentences, and shadowing latencies were recorded. The effect of attended context was interpreted as a result of strategical manipulation of response bias (a resource-limited process), whereas unattended context may be effective through spreading excitation in semantic memory (a data-limited process).…

Discusses a sequential, three-stage model of how nonliteral expressions are understood, as proposed in recent linguistic, philosophical, and psychological studies. Testing the model's implication that nonliteral meanings of sentences are ignored whenever literal meanings are plausible, finds evidence that both meanings are processed simultaneously…

This research investigates the role of speech recoding, particularly its relationship to meaning analysis during reading. Experiment I documents a speech processing conflict; Experiment II analyzes this conflict; and Experiment III demonstrates contributions of speech and meaning processes to reading memory. Results are related to three classes of…

Experiments were conducted to determine the effects of sentence contexts on word recognition and reading. The questions of whether context is predominantly facilitating or inhibiting and how automatic the influence of contexts is on word retrieval were investigated. (SW)