Semantic context and the encoding of words: Evidence for two modes of stimulus analysis

Six experiments with 144 undergraduates tested the hypothesis that semantic context facilitates the encoding of words related to the context. Different tasks (making a lexical decision, detecting a rotated letter in a word, or detecting a gap in one letter of a word) and different experimental parad...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance 1981-06, Vol.7 (3), p.673-687
Main Authors: Schvaneveldt, Roger W, McDonald, James E
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Contextual Associations
Human
Human Information Storage
Semantics
Stimulus Presentation Methods
Words (Phonetic Units)
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Summary:Six experiments with 144 undergraduates tested the hypothesis that semantic context facilitates the encoding of words related to the context. Different tasks (making a lexical decision, detecting a rotated letter in a word, or detecting a gap in one letter of a word) and different experimental paradigms (tachistoscopic exposures with masking stimuli or RT instructions with continuously available target stimuli) were used. Findings are inconsistent with the hypothesis that semantic context lowers the decision criterion in favor of related words. In contrast, the tachistoscopic paradigm yielded data favoring the decision-bias hypothesis. Overall, findings indicate that semantic context does not affect the early stages of stimulus encoding. However, further stimulus analysis occurred subsequent to lexical access, and semantic context facilitated accessing the lexical entries for related words. (25 ref)
ISSN:0096-1523
1939-1277
DOI:10.1037/0096-1523.7.3.673