Automatic Contextual Facilitation in Readers of Three Ages

West, Richard F.; Stanovich, Keith E.

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1978.tb02373.x

Cited by 67 publications

(115 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…A final report that must be considered is that of Becker (1982), who presented a set of strongly constraining (p = .64) and weakly constraining (p = .04) contexts among a larger set of either very high-constraint (p = .94) or very lowconstraint (p = .00) filler contexts that determined the environment. Naming latency for words following the critical .64 and .04 contexts in the high-constraint environment showed mixed facilitation and inhibition for thirdand fifth-grade students and facilitation dominance for adults, similar to the results of West and Stanovich (1978). However, for the low-constraint environment, which, according to the verification model, should induce the inhibition-dominant expectancy strategy, the predicted pattern of inhibition without facilitation was obtained for both third-graders and adults.…”

Section: Other Studies Of Contextual Environmentsupporting

confidence: 66%

Effects of constraint and validity of sentence contexts on lexical decisions

Fischler

Bloom

1985

Memory & Cognition

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Recent models of sentence context effects predict that the pattern of facilitation and inhibition of response to sentence completions should be influenced by the experiment-wide contextual "environment." In the present experiments, this environment was manipulated in several ways, including the degree to which contexts constrained possible completions, the probability of predictable completions' being presented, and the probability of congruous completions' being presented. In Experiment 1, decreasing the proportion of congruent test words had no effect on either the facilitation for highly likely words or the inhibition for incongruent words; increasing the proportion of predictable words produced no increase in facilitation for these words, but did increase the inhibition for incongruous words. In Experiment 2, contexts with very high or very low degrees of constraint produced equivalent results when predictability was uniformly low: no facilitation for unlikely but congruent words, and inhibition for incongruent words. In general, the patterns of change in facilitation and inhibition caused by changes in the contextual environment were more consistent with the modified two-process model (Stanovich & West, 1983) than with the verification model (Becker, 1982). But the limited range of influence suggests that, under conditions approximating normal reading, little use is made of such "metacontextual" information. 128It is not difficult to demonstrate that sentence contexts can influence performance on a variety of word processing tasks. But the mechanism of this influence, as well as its corresponding implications for theories of word retrieval and of reading, remains controversial. The present experiments concerned the extent to which a reader's expectancies can determine these context effects. Our approach was to vary systematically the information provided by sentence contexts at an "experiment-wide" level in several distinct ways. Recent models of the effects of verbal contexts make contrasting predictions about how changes in the contextual "environment" should influence the pattern of contextual effects.The basic paradigm involves presentation of an incomplete sentence context followed by a word that completes or continues the sentence. In most cases, some kind of neutral condition is used to separate context effects into facilitation-the advantage gained by presenting a test word that is congruous with the context-and inhibitionthe costs of incongruous test words. Schuberth and Eimas (1977) found both facilitation for congruous words and inhibition for incongruous words on lexical decision latency. Similar results were obtained by Fischler and Bloom (1979), who also showed that the amount of facilitation was positively related to the predictability of congruous words when predictability varied This research was reported in part at the meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Detroit, May 1981. We are grateful to Keith Stanovich and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on the manusc...

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Section: Other Studies Of Contextual Environmentsupporting

confidence: 66%

Effects of constraint and validity of sentence contexts on lexical decisions

Fischler

Bloom

1985

Memory & Cognition

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“…Many of the developmental Stroop studies focus on reading skill (e.g., Bakan & Shotland, 1969;Corbitt, 1978;Fournier, Mazzarella, Ricciardi, & Fingeret, 1975;Frey, 1971;Ludwig & Lazarus, 1983;West & Stanovich, 1978;Wilder, 1969). The Corbitt (1978) dissertation provides a good example.…”

Section: Age Differencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Half a century of research on the Stroop effect: An integrative review.

MacLeod

1991

Psychological Bulletin

4,743

165

3,607

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The literature on interference in the Stroop Color-Word Task, covering over 50 years and some 400 studies, is organized and reviewed. In so doing, a set ofl 8 reliable empirical findings is isolated that must be captured by any successful theory of the Stroop effect. Existing theoretical positions are summarized and evaluated in view of this critical evidence and the 2 major candidate theories--relative speed of processing and automaticity of reading--are found to be wanting. It is concluded that recent theories placing the explanatory weight on parallel processing of the irrelevant and the relevant dimensions are likely to be more successful than are earlier theories attempting to locate a single bottleneck in attention.In 1935, J. R. Stroop published his landmark article on attention and interference, an article more influential now than it was then. Why has the Stroop task continued to fascinate us? Perhaps the task is seen as tapping into the primitive operations of cognition, offering clues to the fundamental process of attention. Perhaps the robustness of the phenomenon provides a special challenge to decipher. Together these are powerful attractions in a field of complex phenomena where the most subtie variation may exert a dramatic effect.In writing this article, I have two primary intentions. The first is to create a taxonomy of the empirical work on the Stroop task and its analogs. At least 70% of the more than 700 Strooprelated articles in the literature have been published since the reviews by Dyer (1973c) and Jensen and Rohwer (1966). Furthermore, Dyer's theoretical framework now seems in need of reconsideration, so that his review no longer provides the optimal organization. The second aim, then, is to survey existing theories, showing the critical weaknesses in the standard explanations and dispelling some myths that have arisen. I argue for a new theoretical framework for the Stroop effect, informed by contemporary cognitive psychology. This framework is more comprehensive than many earlier experiment-specific hypotheses, and suggests directions in which future research might profitably proceed.

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“…Neely (1977), West & Stanovich (1978) and Stanovich & West (1979) provided evidence for the distinction of two kinds of contextual processes in understanding the semantic facilitation effect. In a number of experiments subjects were required to read a sentence, followed by a target word which was congruous, incongruous or neutral in the sentence context.…”

Section: Learning To Readmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethnic Minority Children Acquiring Literacy

Verhoeven¹

1987

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Automatic Contextual Facilitation in Readers of Three Ages

Cited by 67 publications

References 13 publications

Effects of constraint and validity of sentence contexts on lexical decisions

Effects of constraint and validity of sentence contexts on lexical decisions

Half a century of research on the Stroop effect: An integrative review.

Ethnic Minority Children Acquiring Literacy

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