Completion norms for 40 three-letter word stems

Abstract

This is a report of the completion responses for 40 three-letter word stems (e.g., ABO) produced by 100 undergraduate students at the University of California at San Diego. The report includes a list of the different words that were written as stem completions, their frequency of occurrence as completions, and their frequency of occurrence in English according to published norms. This list of materials is useful for the construction of completion tests for future investigations of direct priming phenomena, and it may provide an important covariate in the analysis of performance on completion tests. Preliminary analyses of the results reveal three primary factors that deterine overall performance on a stem-completion test: word frequency, word length, and meanmgs per word. Analyses of the completions produced for each individual word stem, however, reveal that usually only one of these factors makes a significant contribution to performance.Traditionally, memory research has focused on performance under conditions that require subjects to recollect previously studied items in an intentional manner. These conditions are illustrated by tests, such as recall and recognition, for which subjects are instructed to remember items that were studied in a specific prior episode. A growing number of recent studies have demonstrated, however, that memory can also be indexed by facilitated performance on tests that do not require intentional recollection, such as word completion (e

The effect of corpus size in predicting reaction time in a basic word recognition task: Moving on from Kučera and Francis

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How to drastically reduce priming in word stem completion—and still present the words

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Teste de complementação de letras: estímulos para uso no Brasil

“…Padrões de complementação devem ser determinados para tríades que completam diversas palavras, pois é critério consensual na literatura que as palavras empregadas em testes como os de complementação de tríades devem compartilhar suas tríades com diversas outras palavras comuns (Graf & Williams, 1987). Note, por exemplo, que a tríade BEX só pode ser completada com a palavra BEXIGA (ou palavras derivadas desta).…”

“…Considerando a necessidade de se conhecer quais são as palavras geradas a partir de tríades em português do Brasil e a freqüência ou probabilidade de aparecimento das mesmas, procuramos obter, na primeira fase deste trabalho (experimento 1), um perfil de complementação ao acaso de tríades que podem ser completadas com pelo menos 10 palavras comuns em nosso idioma, critério este amplamente utilizado para selecionar tríades para avaliar a memória (Graf & Williams, 1987).…”

“…Durante anos equiparou-se "testes de memória" com os "tipos de memória" que supostamente seriam por eles avaliados (Richardson-Klavehn & Bjork, 1988). A memória explícita, por exemplo, tendia a ser considerada aquela observada em tarefas de memória explícita, criando uma espécie de caracterização circular da memória de Testes de complementação de conjuntos iniciais de letras para formar palavras (em inglês "stem-completion tests") têm sido extensivamente utilizados para avaliar uma ampla gama de fatores que influenciam a memória de longo prazo (Graf & Williams, 1987). Em geral esses "stems" são compostos de conjuntos de três letras (aqui denominados de tríades), como ABO que pode completar palavras como ABÓBO-RA.…”