Semantic satiation and paired-associate learning.

Abstract

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTIn the course of this research work many have helped me, to whom I can only inadequately express my gratitude.To my advisor, Dr. Wallace E. Lambert, whose careful and constant guidance made completion of this thesis possible, my debt is too great ever to be repaid. INTRODUCTIONThe normal human perceives his environment as a stable and meaningful world of objects, persons, and events, whereas for a newborn child, the same environment probably appears as an aggregate of meaningless shapes and movements. These differences in perceptions are attributable to differences in experiences and contacts with the environment. Through repeated contacts, the individual gradually learns to perceive stimuli in predictable relations and is able to improve his future reactions to the same or similar stimuli.In other words, perceiving meaningful elements in one's environment consciousness within a few seconds after the fixation began. They also pointed out that the meaning of the word vanished when its proper sound image disappeared, and that the disappearance was due to a shifting of attention from one part of the visually perceived word to another. For instance, for their subjects, the word "castle" became "cast-le", the word "toward" became "to-ward," and so on. They also noticed that with prolonged visual fixation a word may look familiar and yet may cease to have any meaning. The authors, following Titchener, interpreted the findings in terms of the "core-contextn theory of meaning. For them the meaning of a word was determined by the associated ideas (context) that word evokes when presented to the subject. Thus they differentiated "meaning" from "familiarity," and they argued that their experiments clearly demonstrated the fact that familiarity does not necessarily involve associated ideas. In other words, prolonged visual fixation of a word leads to loss of meaning or "associative power" in a word without apparent loss of familiarity.Bassett and Warne (1919) used a continued verbal repetition procedure and found that with repetition the word !ost both its meaning and familiarity. The word after continued repetition appeared devoid of any sense and appeared foreign to their subjects. When the meaning of a word dropped away, subjects reported their experience to be very similar to that of encountering a nonsense syllable or a combination of sounds which was neither familiar nor unfamiliar. Occasionally the subjects reported "a feeling of blankness" probably due to the persistence of the sheer sound of the word. The meaning of the word was thus forced into the -6--background and the word lost its distinctiveness.

Semantic Satiation and Verbal Learning

“…In three different studies (Kanungo & Lambert, 1963b;Kanungo and Lambert, 1964;Kanungo, Lambert, & Mauer, 1962), it was observed that prelearning satiation treatment to high meaningful response items resulted not only in a reduction in meaning of the response items as indexed by semantic differential scales but also in a negative transfer effect on subsequent acquisition of paired associates. In other words, when compared with the control group (which got pre-learning satiation treatment of control words that never appeared in subsequent learning) the experimental group (which got pre-learning satiation treatment of response items) showed an impairment in subsequent learning.…”

“…Consistent with a S-R theoretical framework, semantic satiation is viewed (Kanungo, 1962) as a phenomenon in which the response to or meaning of a verbal stimulus is temporarily extinguished by satiation treatment. The continued repetition of a word leads to two correlated consequences.…”

“…In a more recent study Kanungo, Lambert, and Mauer (1962) used high meaningful S and R items and compared the effects of interpolated satiation treatment of the S and R members of paired associates on response recall. Interpolated satiation treatment of S members resulted in significantly more retroactive interference than did non-satiation treatment.…”

“…This phenomenon is known as the semantic generation effect.2 2 In her recent review of the literature, Amster (1964) evaluated the reliability of the phenomenon of semantic satiation and critically examined three different theoretical interpretations. These were: (a) learning interpretation (Kanungo & Lambert, 1963b; Kanungo, Lambert, & Mauer, 1962); (b) inhibition interpretation (Jakobovits, 1962;Lambert & Jakobovits, 1960); and (c) her own interpretation in terms of adaptation level. Her review, however, was deficient in two respects.…”

Meaning change and retroactive effects following low meaningful stimulus and response satiation

“…The present study is designed to verify Kanungo & Lambert's (1963) contention that satiation treatment to nonsense items do not result in significant semantic change; and to test the predictions of Kanungo, Lambert, & Mauer (1962), that by using low meaningful S-R pairs one can obtain retroactive facilitation and inhibition effects respectively after interpolated satiation treatment to the response and stimulus items.…”