Encoding specificity and integration of word pairs

Abstract

Word concreteness was shown to have a differential effect on recognition-cued recall differences for noun-adjective pairs in a variant of the Tulving and Thomson (1973) paradigm. Consistent with the notion of integration of concrete word pairs, cued recall was superior to recognition for concrete-concrete pairs, but not for other pair types. For abstract-concrete and abstract-abstract pairs the data suggested that recognition was superior to recall. For concrete-abstract pairs there was no difference between recognition and recall. This study was prompted by an attempt to investigate further the notions of encoding specificity (Tulving & Thomson, 1973) and integration of concrete word pairs (Begg, 1972). Olson (1974) showed that the superiority of cued recal1 over recognition performance, found by Tulving and Thomson (1973) only holds for items that could be categorized as noun-adjective pairs. Further examination of the noun-adjective pairs used suggests that they are all concrete-concrete items. Begg (1972) has shown that concrete-concrete adjective-noun pairs lead to better performance on a cued recall task as compared with a free recal1 task for the adjective members of the pairs. Begg argued that this is due to integrated memory structures aroused by concrete-concrete pairs.This study investigates the hypothesis that one factor that affects recall-recognition differences is the degree of integration of a given pair of words. It is proposed that a pair of concrete words is more likely to be encoded as an integrated unit and performance on a cued recall task would be relatively better in the Tulving and Thomson paradigm. On the other hand, word pairs other than concrete-concrete tend not be encoded as integrated units and recognition would be expected to be better than recall. METHOD SubjectsThe subjects were IS volunteers from the introductory psychology course at Brooklyn College. MaterialsThree lists of noun-adjective pairs were constructed . One of the lists, the crit ical list, was used to test the experimental hypothesis while the other two were "priming" lists. Th e critical list was composed of both "high" and " low concreteness' nouns from the Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968) norms, and "high" and "low concreteness' adjectives used by Begg (1972). Stimulus and response concreteness were varied factorially, yielding six pairs each of concrete-concrete (CC), concre te-abstract (CA), abstract-concrete (AC), and abstract-abstract (AA) words . An independent judge with experi ence in the verbal learning area selected pairs so that they were approximately equal in

Item-specific effects in recognition failure: Reasons for rejection of the Tulving-Wiseman function

“…In fact, Olson found that the level ofcued recall for the adjective was higher than the level of recognition, thus guaranteeing a nonzero level of recognition failure. DeVito (1975) found that the difference between cued recall and recognition for noun-adjective pairs was a function of the concreteness of the pair. By DeVito's criterion, all the pairs used here were concrete.…”