title: [An investigation of the unit of activation in on-line inferences during text processing: word-unit or proposition-unit?].
abstract: This study investigated the unit of activation in on-line inferences. To explore whether the activation of inferences is a word-unit or a proposition-unit, a meaningfulness-decision task was devised as a priming measure. The task required participants to decide whether a series of short sentences was meaningful or not. The result of Experiment 1 suggested that only proposition-units were activated. A priming effect was observed in targets which described inferences both at word-level and proposition-level, but not in targets which described inferences at word-level only. In Experiment 2, a meaningfulness-decision task was administered to investigate word-based priming and to make sure that the result of Experiment 1 was not caused by characteristics of the task. In Experiment 3, a priming effect was found in targets which described inferences using alternative perspectives and words. These results suggest that the unit of activation in on-line inferences is proposition-units and that these activations relate to the proposition-semantic level, not the word or single-concept level.
authors.affiliation: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Institute of Psychology, University of Tsukuba, Tennodai, Tsukuba 305-8572.
authors.forename: Ryuta
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Iseki
mesh_terms: D008606:Mental Processes; D011939:Mental Recall; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics