On the relation between feeling of knowing and lexical decision: persistent subthreshold activation or topic familiarity?
Experiment 1 replicated Yaniv and Meyer's (1987) finding that lexical decision and episodic recognition performance was better for words previously yielding high-accessibility levels (a combination of feeling-of-knowing and tip-of-the-tongue ratings) in comparison with those yielding low-accessibility levels in a rare word definition task. Experiment 2 yielded the same pattern even though lexical decisions preceded accessibility estimates by a full week. Experiment 3 dismissed the possibility that the Experiment 2 results may have been due to a long-term influence from the lexical decision task to the rare word judgment task. These results support a model in which Ss (a) retrieve topic familiarity information in making accessibility estimates in the rare word definition task and (b) use this information to modulate lexical decision performance.
Connor
L T
LT
Department of Psychology, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri 63130.
Balota
D A
DA
Neely
J H
JH
D000328:Adult; D003657:Decision Making; D006801:Humans; D011939:Mental Recall; D011340:Problem Solving; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011930:Reaction Time; D012153:Retention, Psychology; D014706:Verbal Learning