Semantic integration and sentence perception

Abstract

A mixed list of semantically well-integrated (SWI) and semantically poorly integrated (SPI) sentences (constructed from associative sentence norms) was presented for shadowing to one group of Ss under quiet and to another group under noise (-5 db signal-to-noise ratio). The SWI and SPI sentences were balanced for length, number, and stress of syllables, number and type of phones, noun animateness, and word frequency. An incidental-recall task followed one trial of shadowing. As anticipated, shadowing under quiet was virtually perfect for both SWI and SPI sentences, noise reduced shadowing overall and SWI sentences were shadowed better than SPI sentences under noise. Incidental learning of SWl material was enhanced by noise, and noise produced a difference in incidental learning in favor of SWI material. An assumption underlying the present research is that the meaning of a word is represented by (among other things) the linguistic contexts that are part of its dictionary definition and the linguistic contexts that are correlates of the experiences (linguistic and nonlinguistic) commonly associated with the word. Such contexts are referred to here as a word's contextual features. Thus, on this view the predicates in the sentences, The doctor