Ian Begg

Concreteness and Imagery in Sentence Meaning.

Previous research has shown that Ss recognize semantic changes in sentences more readily than changes in their wording when meaning remains unchanged. The present experiment yielded the same results for concrete sentences. In the case of abstract sentences, however, changes in wording were more noticeable than semantic changes. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that concrete sentences are coded and stored primarily as nonverbal images that retain the meaning but not the wording of the sentences, whereas abstract sentences are stored primarily in their verbal form.

Recall of Meaningful Phrases.

Lists of meaningful adjective-noun phrases were presented to S s who were asked for partial recall of nouns or adjectives, whole recall of everything, or cued recall of the nouns or adjectives. These tasks were compared with the free recall of nouns or adjectives. In concrete pairs, cued recall exceeded the other three conditions, which did not differ from each other. In abstract pairs, free recall exceeded the other tasks which did not differ among themselves. The results support the hypothesis that concrete pairs are remembered as unitized images, while abstract pairs are remembered as verbal strings.

Recognition memory for sentence meaning and wording

Several hundred sentences were auditorily and visually presented to S s in a continuous recognition paradigm. The test sentences were either identical to the original or were paraphrases. Subjects were required to judge both the meaning and the wording of the test sentences as old or new. Meaning judgments decreased in accuracy as a function of lag, while the accuracy of wording judgments was uncorrelated to either the meaning judgments or lag. Meaning judgments were no less accurate if the test sentence was a paraphrase than if it was identical to the original, although the accuracy of wording judgments was above chance. Meaning judgments were affected relatively little by modality, while wording judgments were more accurate in visual presentations. Also, meaning and wording judgments were stochastically independent of each other.

Imagery and comprehension latencies as a function of sentence concreteness and structure

The relation between imagery and comprehension of sentences was investigated in two experiments using reaction time measures. Consistent with predictions from a two-process approach to meaning and mediation, one experiment showed that Ss took longer to generate images to abstract than to concrete sentences, but comprehension latencies did not differ significantly as a function of concreteness. A second experiment showed that sentence processing time (reading, paraphrasing, comprehending, and imaging) generally increased with complexity of either surface structure or deep structure, with some qualification of the effect depending upon how sentence meaning was defined in the instructions given to Ss. Mean imagery and comprehension latencies for sentences were highly correlated (rs = .81 and .83) in both experiments, despite a reversal in overall means; imagery latencies exceeded comprehension latencies in Experiment 1 but were shorter than the latter in Experiment 2.

Pictures and words in visual search.

Ss in three experiments searched through an array of pictures or words for a target item that had been presented as a picture or a word. In Experiments I and II, the pictures were line drawings of familiar objects and the words were their printed labels; in Experiment III, the stimuli were photographs of the faces of famous people and their corresponding printed names. Search times in Experiments I and II were consistently faster when the array items were pictures than when they were words, regardless of the mode of the target items. Search was also faster with pictures than with words as targets when the search array also consisted of pictures, but target mode had no consistent effect with words as array items. Experiment III yielded a completely different pattern of results: Search time with names as targets and faces as search array items was significantly slower than in the other three conditions, which did not differ from each other. Considered in relation to several theories, the results are most consistent with a dual-coding interpretation. That is, items that are cognitively represented both verbally and as nonverbal images can be searched and compared in either mode, depending on the demands of the task. The mode actually used depends on whether the search must be conducted through an array of pictures or words.

Contextual imagery in meaning and memory

Three hundred homonyms were selected, and sentence fragments were written to emphasize two meanings of each. The words were rated on image-arousing capacity both in and out of context and on frequency of occurrence in context. Imagery values for the words out of context were predicted quite well by an average of the contextual imagery ratings, weighted by their relative frequencies. The finding is consistent with the hypothesis that words presented in isolation are interpreted in specific senses according to a frequency bias, with imagery ratings reflecting those senses. In a memory experiment. words were selected to vary orthogonally on both contextual and out-of-context imagery. Recall of words in isolation was a function of out-of-context imagery, while recall of words presented in context was a function of contextual imagery, further supporting the hypothesis.

Context concreteness and form class in the retention of nonsense syllables

Groups of Ss received four study-test trials on lists of 10 nonsense syllables (CVCs) embedded in phrases of the type “the (adjective) (CVC)” or “the (CVC) (noun).” The concreteness of the nouns and adjectives was varied in four experiments involving free recall (Experiment I), recognition memory (Experiment II), associative recall (Experiment III), and associative recognition (Experiment IV) of the CVCs. Form class effects were found only in the recognition experiments, and concreteness effects were found only in the associative experiments. The findings indicate that concreteness is most effective in tasks requiring stimulus-response association.