Word Recognition, Meaningfulness, and Familiarity

Abstract

Thac the exposure time necessary for rhe correct recognirion of verbal materials, using an ascending method of limits, is inversely related to the frequency with which che material has been experienced, in the past, has been established with considerable certainty. Two principal approaches have been used. The firsc indicated a correlation of about -.70 between the frequency of occurrence of words in the language and their recognirion chresholds ( 1 ) . The second approach established ddferencial experience for nonsense words as part of the experimental proced~~re (4). The firsc approach has been criticized (4) and the second suffers from an inapplicability to meaningful stimulus patterns. A third procedure, which overcomes some of the deficiencies of the earlier methods, involves using responses ro infer frequency of experience. The logic of this has been detailed by Noble (2, 3) who has provided a set of verbal materials scaled for meaningfulness (m) and familiarity (f). Meaningfulness is defined as the average number of different responses in association to a stimulus word per unit time, while familiarity is based on a racing scale technique. A brief experiment has been done in which recognition thresholds for words selected over the entire range of m values have been measured by the ascending method of limits in a Gerbrands cachistoscope. The procedure was similar to that employed by Solomon and Postman (5) except that step intervals of .03 sec. were used between durations less than .5 sec. and of .O5 sec. between greacer duracions. The resulcs, In Table 1, are averages for 15 Ss.