Observers were required to classify letter strings as words or nonwords under the following three conditions: (a) when the target stimulus alone was presented, (b) when the target was preceded by an incomplete sentence, and (c) when the target was preceded by a string of four spelled-out digits. Word targets were either high-or low-frequency items and either semantically congruous or incongruous with respect to the incomplete sentence. Nonword targets were either pronounceable or nonpronounceable. The presentation of sentence contexts facilitated the classification of congruous words and both pronounceable and nonpronounceable nonwords but interfered with the classification of incongruous words. The digit contexts interfered equally with the processing of all targets. The results were discussed within the framework of Morton's logogen model of word processing.
Two experiments were conducted to investigate context effects on the lexical decision process. In both experiments, observers classified letter strings as words or nonwords following the presentation of context in the form of an incomplete sentence. In Experiment I, the predictability of congruous word stimuli and their frequency of occurrence in printed English were varied. These two factors had independent and additive effects on decision latencies. Stimulus quality, word frequency, and semantic congruity (i.e., congruous vs. incongruous) between the context and the stimulus were varied in Experiment 2. The effects of semantic congruity and word frequency on decision latencies combined additively, as did the effects of semantic congruity and stimulus quality. Two complementary mechanisms were proposed within the framework of a modified version of Becker's verification model to account for the differential effects of single-wordand sentence context priming on the lexical decision process.
68The effects of semantic context on the process of word recognition currently provide the focus for much research. A primary goal of this line of research has been to provide an explanation of how visual and contextual information are combined during reading. As our knowledge of context effects has increased, a variety of theoretical word recognition models have been advanced to describe the interaction of visual and contextual infor-
An experiment was performed to test the hypothesis that the effect of category name priming on anagram solving varies with the strength of the relationship between the solution word and the priming category. Subjects solved anagrams of taxonomic category instances under primed or unprimed conditions. In the primed condition, the name of the taxonomic category from which the solution word was chosen was provided on each trial. Priming was shown to facilitate anagram solution and the extent of this facilitation was directly related to the instance dominance of the solution word in the priming category. The results were discussed in terms of current models of semantic memory.
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