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)

Results are reported which show that the facilitating effect of recall on recognition is quite substantial. (AM)

Four experiments are reported which investigate isolation effects in free recall. (RM)

Many theories of memory assume memory representations are abstract and exclude specific lexical information. Results of three experiments in this study suggest lexical information is present and persists in memory representations of meaning. A word-based theory of memory should be preferred over available theoretical alternatives. (CHK)

Describes four experiments of conditions under which irregular spelling or pronunciation influence two reading tasks--naming and lexical decision. Concludes that such irregularities only influence the reading of lower frequency words and that recognition of a large class of higher frequency words is insensitive to irregularities of spelling or…

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).…

Spaced presentations of 12- and 15-word lists were better recalled when no task or an easy task intervened between presentations. Results indicate a lack of generality in Bjork and Allen's 1970 findings and a need for a two-factor theory of the spacing effect, and are evidence for a spacing effect. (CHK)

Evidence supports the hypothesis that visual word recognition may involve recoding into phonemic form. Less pronounceable nonsense words are recognized as nonsense faster than those more pronounceable. Differences in pronounceability may produce their effects during sequencing of neural instructions of each phoneme. (CHK)

Definitions of four rare words were read to 259 undergraduates who were asked to record letters and syllables of the words, at the tip of the tongue. Results corresponded to an earlier study, with morpheme-like clusters evident. Results indicate an organizing memory system for words used in speech. (CHK)

Subjects studied and were tested for recognition and recall of target words on lists of cue-target word pairs. List-cued recall was higher than non-cued recall, suggesting that recognition failure is independent of subjects' familiarity with task requirements. This contradicts attribution of encoding specificity phenomena to subjects' confusion.…

Experiments explored the hypothesis that immediate memory span varies with length of recalled words. Relationships between memory and word length, temporal duration, reading speed and visual and auditory presentation were investigated. Results are interpreted in terms of a phonemically-based store of limited temporal capacity with varied…

In two experiments using the Brown-Peterson memory paradigm, instructions to guess had small effects on recall, but sizeable effects on incidence of prior list intrustion. However, results indicate that proactive interference is primarily the result of inability to generate correct items, rather than confusion between present and previous items.…

This contradicts N. F. Johnson's arguments that word perception does not follow letter perception and that letter analysis awaits identification of the word as a unit. His experiments lack controls, and uncontrolled factors may contribute to his effects. Johnson's implications for prior-letter-processing models are contradicted. (CHK)

Describes an experiment designed to test predictions derived from a model of recognition memory that assumes no retrieval processes. It is argued that context effects do not necessarily imply retrieval processes in recognition. (Author/AM)

Three experiments are reported regarding reaction time. Letter comparison time was found to increase when other irrelevant letters were present, regardless of whether or not the letters made up a word or a word-like configuration. Word comparison time was found to increase when distractors were similar to targets. (Author/RM)