OPERANT CONDITIONING OF A CLASS OF WORD ASSOCIATES

The 25 most common word associates to the word MUSIC were presented, one at a time, to a group of Ss, each MUSIC associate being paired with two control words. Ss were instructed to say aloud one of the words on each card. Experimental Ss were reinforced each time they emitted one of the word associ...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Staats,Arthur W, Staats,Carolyn K, Minke,Karl A
Format: Report
Language:English
Subjects:
LEARNING
MUSIC
PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTS
Psychology
REACTION(PSYCHOLOGY)
REINFORCEMENT(PSYCHOLOGY)
VOCABULARY
WORD ASSOCIATION
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Summary:The 25 most common word associates to the word MUSIC were presented, one at a time, to a group of Ss, each MUSIC associate being paired with two control words. Ss were instructed to say aloud one of the words on each card. Experimental Ss were reinforced each time they emitted one of the word associates to MUSIC; none of the responses of control Ss were reinforced. The results indicated that the associates to the word MUSIC constitute a response class, i.e., reinforcing certain of these associates increases the probability of further associates occurring. A tentative S-R analysis of this phenomenon was suggested in terms of complex interassociations among these word associates. (Author) Rept. on proj: 'Psychological Processes in Language Communication.'