Determinants of word fragment completion.
A current debate in the memory literature concerns the validity of word fragment completion (WFC) as a test of implicit memory. It has been claimed that language variables exert a strong influence on the task, and that the task reflects memory only to a small extent (Hintzman & Hartry, 1990). For these reasons, the use of contingency analyses of recognition and WFC performance as a means of studying underlying memory processes has been criticized. The present study addressed this issue by examining the influence of language variables on completion of a set of computer generated single-solution fragments of Swedish words (Olofsson & Nyberg, 1992). It was found that language variables indeed had a large effect on completion performance, and that priming only accounted for a small portion of variance in the task. It is therefore suggested that the method of triangulation should be employed for contingency analyses involving WFC.
Olofsson
U
U
Department of Psychology, University of Umeå, Sweden.
Nyberg
L
L
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D008875:Middle Aged; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning; D011340:Problem Solving; D012660:Semantics