Contextual imagery in meaning and memory

Abstract

Three hundred homonyms were selected, and sentence fragments were written to emphasize two meanings of each. The words were rated on image-arousing capacity both in and out of context and on frequency of occurrence in context. Imagery values for the words out of context were predicted quite well by an average of the contextual imagery ratings, weighted by their relative frequencies. The finding is consistent with the hypothesis that words presented in isolation are interpreted in specific senses according to a frequency bias, with imagery ratings reflecting those senses. In a memory experiment. words were selected to vary orthogonally on both contextual and out-of-context imagery. Recall of words in isolation was a function of out-of-context imagery, while recall of words presented in context was a function of contextual imagery, further supporting the hypothesis.

Imagery and contextual organization

“…Recall of the two words "dress" and "ring" depended on the degree of association between the cue and the context, but not on the concreteness of the cues. Of course, ratings of imagery in isolation are not identical to ratings in specific contexts (Begg & Clark, 1975), so that the lack of an effect of concreteness is difficult to interpret. However, the fact that cues highly associated with the context lead to better recall than do less associated cues fits well with the expectation that interaction during study between an item and a context is necessary for the item later to access the context, enabling redintegration of the other responses.…”

Lexicons, Contexts, Events, and Images: Commentary on Elman (2009) From the Perspective of Dual Coding Theory

“…Begg and Clark (1975) obtained imagery ratings for homonyms that have both a concrete and an abstract meaning, as well for the words in sentence contexts that biased concrete or abstract interpretations (e.g., justice of the peace versus love of justice ). Free recall tests showed that out‐of‐context word imagery ratings correlated significantly with recall of words in lists, whereas imagery ratings in contexts correlated significantly with recall of the words in sentence contexts.…”

Frequency of occurrence and concreteness ratings of homograph meanings

“…Most of the uses center around the fact that homographs can be encoded in different ways. Because of this feature, homographs make excellent stimuli for experiments on set or priming (e.g., Cramer, 1968;Skanes & Donderi, 1973), encoding specificity (e.g., Goldstein, Schmitt, & Scheirer, 1978;Light & Carter-Sobell, 1970;Winograd & Conn, 1971), transfer (e.g., Hastroudi & Johnson, 1976Muller, Brown, & Kausler, 1975), imagery (e.g., Begg & Clark, 1975), frequency estimation (e.g., Geis & Winograd, 1975;Rowe, 1973), clustering (e.g., Kausler & Kamichoff, 1970), and cerebral laterality (Wollen, Cox, Coahran, & Shea, Note 1).…”