Abstract
Using a procedure that isolates the facilitatory and interfering effects of a semantic context, the present study examines two distinct patterns of context effects. One pattern shows a dominance of facilitation for target words in a related context, and the other pattern shows a dominance of interference for target words in an unrelated context. The controlling factor seems to be the overall characteristics of the stimulus list. For materials that include semantic relationships that are consistent in the strength of the relationships, facilitation dominance obtains. For materials that include a wide range of semantic relationship strengths, interference dominance results. These two patterns of facilitation and interference are attributed to two semantic strategies available to subjects for using context information. The explication of the strategies includes a theoretical treatment of the present data.
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Eisenberg, P., & Becker, C. A.Semantic context effects in visual word recognition, sentence processing, and reading: Evidence for semantic strategies. Manuscript in preparation, 1980.
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This research was partially supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Child Health and Development to David LaBerge and S. Jay Samuels.
Portions of this research were initially reported at the meeting of the Psychonomic Society, November 1978, San Antonio, Texas.
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Becker, C.A. Semantic context effects in visual word recognition: An analysis of semantic strategies. Memory & Cognition 8, 493–512 (1980). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03213769
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03213769