In forward testing effects, taking a test enhances memory for subsequently studied material. These effects have been observed for previously studied and tested items, a potentially item-specific testing effect, and newly studied untested items, a purely generalized testing effect. We directly compared item-specific and generalized forward testing effects using procedures to separate testing benefits due to encoding versus retrieval. Participants studied two lists of Swahili-English word pairs, with the second study list containing "new" pairs intermixed with the previously studied "old" pairs. Participants completed a review phase in which they took a cued-recall test on only the "old" pairs or restudied them. In Experiments 1a, 1b, and 2, the review phase was given either before or after the second study list. Testing benefited memory to the same degree for both "new" and "old" pairs, suggesting that there were no pair-specific benefits of testing. The larger benefit from testing when review was given before rather than after the second study list suggests that the memory enhancement was due to both testing-enhanced encoding and testing-enhanced retrieval. To better equate generalized testing effects for "new" and "old" pairs, Experiment 3 intermixed them in the review phase. A statistically significant pair-specific testing effect for "old" items was now observed. Overall, these results show that forward testing effects are due to both testing-enhanced encoding and retrieval effects and that direct, pair-specific forward testing benefits are considerably smaller than indirect, generalized forward testing benefits.

Many models of word recognition assume that processing proceeds sequentially from analysis of form to analysis of meaning. In the context of morphological processing, this implies that morphemes are processed as units of form prior to any influence of their meanings. Some interpret the apparent absence of differences in recognition latencies to targets (SNEAK) in form and semantically similar (sneaky-SNEAK) and in form similar and semantically dissimilar (sneaker-SNEAK) prime contexts at a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 48 ms as consistent with this claim. To determine the time course over which degree of semantic similarity between morphologically structured primes and their targets influences recognition in the forward masked priming variant of the lexical decision paradigm, we compared facilitation for the same targets after semantically similar and dissimilar primes across a range of SOAs (34–100 ms). The effect of shared semantics on recognition latency increased linearly with SOA when long SOAs were intermixed (Experiments 1A and 1B) and latencies were significantly faster after semantically similar than dissimilar primes at homogeneous SOAs of 48 ms (Experiment 2) and 34 ms (Experiment 3). Results limit the scope of form-then-semantics models of recognition and demonstrate that semantics influences even the very early stages of recognition. Finally, once general performance across trials has been accounted for, we fail to provide evidence for individual differences in morphological processing that can be linked to measures of reading proficiency.

The testing effect is the finding that taking a review test enhances performance on a final test relative to restudying the material. The present experiment investigated transfer-appropriate processing in the testing effect using semantic and orthographic cues to evoke conceptual and data-driven processing, respectively. After a study phase, subjects either restudied the material or took a cued-recall test consisting of half semantic and half orthographic cues in which the correct response was given as feedback. A final, cued-recall test consisted of the identical cue, or a new cue that was of the same type or different type of cue (semantic/orthographic or orthographic/semantic) as that used for that target in the review test. Testing enhanced memory in all conditions. When the review cues and final-test cues were identical, final recall was higher for semantic than orthographic cues. Consistent with test-based transfer-appropriate processing, memory performance improved as the review and final cues became more similar. These results suggest that the testing effect could potentially be caused by the episodic retrieval processes in a final memory test overlapping more with the episodic retrieval processes in a review test than with the encoding operations performed during restudy.