Effect of Verbal Context on Latency of Word Selection

Abstract

GOLDMAN-EISLER1,2 found that low transition probabilities between words were associated with the occurrence of pauses in speech, both for the original speaker selecting words spontaneously and for subjects guessing missing words from the same verbal context. We can assume that differences in latency reflect, however crudely, something of the search or word retrieval system used in selecting words. Oldfield and Wingfield3 have recently used it to throw light on object naming, using a range of objects the names of which varied in frequency of occurrence in the language. They found a linear relation between latency of naming and the logarithm of the frequency of occurrence of the object's name. A comparable investigation is reported here on latencies for guessing words removed from a number of different verbal contexts the redundancy of which varied from that of random words to a passage of coherent prose.