Under certain experimental conditions, it was affirmed more quickly that a word belonged to a large category than to a small one. This, in conjunction with other experiment results, contradicts predictions of previous theories of word meaning and supports a feature selection theory derived from Garner's critical realism position. (CHK)

Two experiments are reported investigating the effects of immediate recall upon subsequent recall and recognition of list items and examining the relation between positive and negative recency effects. (Author/RM)

Effects of disambiguating prior contexts upon processing of lexical ambiguities in sentences were investigated. Subjects listened to lexically ambiguous sentences after a neutral or a disambiguating prior contest, and monitored for phonemes occurring immediately after each ambiguous word. Reaction times were significnatly longer following…

Subjects learned meanings for 16 invented words and practiced categorizing each word according to its meaning. Each word appeared consistently in either script or uppercase type. Subsequently subjects categorized words in both versions; at first, categorization was slower for unfamiliar versions. Subjects relied on both configuration information…

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).…

A set of experiments are reported in which it was found that most subjects were better at identifying both meaning and wording changes in concrete sentences and subjects took significantly longer to encode and decode the abstract sentences. Implications of these findings are discussed. (Author/RM)

Presents evidence in support of the ordered search model of word meaning computation in sentence contexts. This model hypothesizes that access to multiple meanings occurs in a fixed order regardless of context. (AM)

Expanded version of a talk presented at the meeting of the Eastern Verbal Investigators League, Brandeis University, May 1, 1971. (VM)

Research supported by grants from the National Science Foundation. (DS)

Two experiments examined the effects of level of processing and uniqueness of encoding on the ability to recognize the nominal stimulus among either semantically similar or structurally similar distractor items. (Author/NCR)

Discusses the findings of six studies that were undertaken to explore the phenomenon of semantic priming, questioning whether it is semantically or associatively based. Results indicated that the role of semantics in the priming process is somewhat limited. In addition, these results indicated that the amount of priming observed is somewhat task…

Examines two sets of variables that influence age-related patterns of text recall--the effects of verbal ability level and text structure variables on text recall of younger, middle-aged, and older adults. Results indicate that age differences in the discovery and utilization of the organizational structure of texts were found to be mediated by…

Levels of processing were manipulated as a function of acquisition task and type of recognition test in three experiments. Experiment I showed semantic acquisition to be superior to rhyme acquisition given a standard recognition test, whereas rhyme acquisition was superior given a rhyming recognition test. Results are interpreted and discussed.…