Word repetition, lexical access, and the process of searching words and sentences

Abstract

Subjects were asked to search a list of words for nonword letter strings. Such exposure to these words was sufficient to (a) speed subsequent search of a new list containing these words whether this search was for nonwords or required deeper semantic evaluation, and (b) reduce errors in interpretive search of prose passages. One account of these results is that exposure to written words facilitates subsequent lexical access and that lexical access operates similarly in a variety of uses of written material. The results of our three experiments extend, with word lists and both scrambled and coherent text, the finding of D. L. Scarborough, C. Cortese, and H. S. Scarborough (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1977 , 3, 1–17) that exposure to single words facilitates lexical judgments of single words. Our results together with those of Scarborough et al. suggest that recency of exposure may contribute to word “frequency” effects in reading and in learning from written material.