Text repetition and text integration

Abstract

Two experiments explored the levels of text representation that mediate text repetition effects, following the Raney (2003) model. The magnitude of the repetition benefit in Experiment 1 supported predictions of Raney's model, indicating that the ease of forming a situation model contributed to the magnitude of the reprocessing benefit. In addition, representations organized around a good situation model were more sensitive to changes than were representations formed from reading without a good situation model. The results of Experiment 2 did not support the suggestion that the surface form and textbase are bound to a well-developed situation model, thereby limiting repetition effects to similar linguistic contexts. Rather, the nature of the repetition benefits in the present series of experiments are better explained by the degree of overlap between passages at each of the three levels of text representation.

Repeated text in unrelated passages: Repetition versus meaning selection effects

“…Manipulations of the elaboration of the repeated text indicate that when two passages do not share a theme, characters, or setting information, the repeated text must be salient for repetition effects to occur. Although the long-term priming effects (e.g., Sloman et al, 1988) and of text repetition effects across a 24-h delay (Collins & Levy, 2007), whereas there has been no evidence of this type of long-term meaning selection effect.…”

“…This occurred even though Story A and Story B were episodically distinct and even though the readers had no reason to believe that Story A and Story B made up a single trial. Furthermore, Klin et al (2007) demonstrated that the slow- is some evidence of text repetition effects across a 24-h delay (Collins & Levy, 2007). However, this was done with passages that had substantial overlap; 7 sentences were repeated across passages that were 15-17 sentences in length, and thus, there were many opportunities for readers to retrieve the original processing episode.…”

“…Although repetition effects have been demonstrated across relatively long delays (e.g., Collins & Levy, 2007;Kolers, 1976), meaning selection effects have not. Thus, there may be a repetition effect in Story B (shorter reading times for the repetition line in the repeated condition) but no meaning selection effect (no reading time difference for the sarcasm disambiguation line).…”

“…There is evidence from across a number of domains that priming in tasks that involve a perceptual representational system (Tulving & Schacter, 1990) can persist across retention intervals that are very long and that are considerably longer than those based solely on conceptual processes. For example, in a rereading study, Collins and Levy (2007) had participants read two 15-to 17-sentence passages that shared 7 sentences. Repetition effects, defined as faster reading for the repeated sentences, were found across a 24-h delay when the passages were highly related.…”

“…(For a similar study, see Collins & Levy, 2007, who had "less related" passage pairs that shared several sentences.) Consider the passage pair in Table 1.…”