Two experiments explore the activation of semantic information during spoken word recognition. Experiment 1 shows that as the name of an object unfolds (e.g., lock), eye movements are drawn to pictorial representations of both the named object and semantically related objects (e.g., key). Experiment 2 shows that objects semantically related to an…

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)

Rote, repetitive Type I Rehearsal is defined as the continuous maintenance of information in memory using the minimum cognitive capacity necessary for maintenance. An analysis of errors made on a forced-choice recognition test supported the hypothesis that acoustic-phonemic components of the memory trace are added or strengthened by this…

A study is reported describing an output-monitoring phenomenon in free recall and establishing that subjects have accurate knowledge concerning their previous output performance. Implications with respect to other known memory phenomena are discussed. (Author/RM)

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.…

Two experiments were conducted to test how readers process unattended words in a display and how the semantic category of these flanking words affects response time. (Author/AM)

Two experiments showed the proportion of recalled words recognized to be higher than expected when the experiment was conducted under typical study conditions. Under special study conditions, the proportion of recalled words recognized more closely approximated expected values. Exceptions depend on encoding operations rather than on the properties…

A study examined how preschool children use information about linguistic contrast in learning new words. The 72 subjects were assigned to four groups to play a game. They were asked to get an unfamiliar item, one of nine swatches of different colors, shapes, and materials. In the first group, the children were told only one label (color, shape, or…

Subjects listened to a story containing sentences with five quantifiers (all, many, some, a few, and none) and were tested to determine recognition of quantifiers. The degree of confusion between any two quantifiers declined monotonically with the separation of the two terms in a linear order. (SW)

Five experiments are described that detail both the structure of lexical representations accessed in visual word recognition and the method of parsing words in order to access these representations. The results support a system of lexical access that is not mediated by phonological encoding. (SW)

An experiment is described that involved presenting sentences to the subject for study and then testing single words for recognition (the subject had to decide whether the test word was in one of the study sentences). A large priming effect was obtained. (Author/RM)

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)

Two studies examined children's perceptual biases in extracting or identifying words from the stream of speech. In one study, evidence for the salience of stressed and final syllables was found. Young children less frequently omitted those syllables from their productions and produced unstressed and nonfinal syllables less accurately. A second…

The relationship between the effects of morphological complexity and associative production frequency was investigated in two experiments on sentence verification. The purpose of the study was to investigate how morphologically derived words are represented in memory. (Author/RM)