Abstract: . . .  AND WORD RETENTION 281 the remaining 80 words served as distractors; the second 8 subjects received the second block of 40 words as targets and the third 8 subjects received the third block of 40—in all cases the remaining 80 words formed the distractor pool. Within each group of 8 subjects who received the same 40 target words, 4 received one form of the recognition test and 4 received the other form. Finally, within each group of 4 subjects, each word was rotated so that it appeared (for different subjects) in all four conditions: non- semantic yes and no and semantic yes and no . Each subject was tested individually. After the two tasks had been explained, he was given a few practice trials, then received 40 further trials, 10 under each experimental condition. The order of presentation of conditions was randomized. After a brief rest period the subject was given the recognition list and told to circle exactly 40 words (those he had just seen on the tachisto- scope), guessing if necessary. The subjects were 24 undergraduate students of both sexes, paid for their services. Results. The results of the experiment are straightforward. Table 4 shows that the nonsemantic task took longer to accomplish but that the deeper sentence task gave rise to higher levels of recognition. Decisions about consonant-vowel structure of words were substantially slower than sentence decisions (1.7 sec as opposed to .85 sec) and this difference was significant statis- tically, F (1, 23) = 11.3, p < . . .
. . .  looked into the tachistoscope and the word was exposed. The experiment was again described as a perceptual, reaction time study concerning different aspects of words and the subject was instructed to respond as rapidly as possible by pressing one of two response keys. The seman- tic task was the sentence task from previous studies in the series. In this case, the subject was shown a card with a short sentence typed on it; the sentence had one missing word, thus the subject's task was to decide whether the word on the tachistoscope screen would fit the sentence. Examples of sentence- yes trials are: "The man threw the ball to the ————" (CHILD) and "Near her bed she kept a ————" (CLOCK). On sentence- no trials an inappropriate noun from the general pool was exposed on the tachistoscope. Again the subject responded as rapidly as pos- sible. The subjects were not informed of the subsequent memory test. The pool of words used consisted of 120 high frequency, concrete five-letter nouns. Each sub- ject received 40 words on the initial decision phase of the task and was then shown all 120 words, 40 targets and 80 distractors mixed ran- domly, in the second phase. He was then asked to recognize the 40 words he had been shown on the tachistoscope by circling exactly 40 words. Two forms of the recognition test were typed with the same 120 words randomized differently. In all, 24 subjects were tested in the experiment. The pool of 120 words was arbitrarily partitioned into three blocks of . . .
--3000,2,750,3161,54817