Abstract

In each of two experiments 992 novel compounds of associatively unrelated Dutch nouns were rated for “plausibility” or meaningfulness of the compound. The independent variables of interest in Experiment 1 were associate-availability (high or low) and associate dominance (high or low). High availability and low dominance were found to lead to significantly higher plausibility ratings. Experiment 2 included a replication of Experiment 1 and extended its findings with a “distractor” task condition and with a “variable-scale” task condition. Whereas the effect of availability is expectable, the effect of dominance is not readily predictable on a priori grounds. This latter result was interpreted as favoring a network theory of retrieval over a rival decision theory.

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