Semantic satiation, forewarning, and decision latency

Abstract

Sixteen Ss were asked to decide if pairs of words had the same meaning. It was found that asking S to repeat one of the words 1 or 15 sec. in advance equally facilitated his decision. The results indicate thatforewarning and not semantic satiation reduces decision latency. Problem Fillenbaum (1964) has found that if S is asked to decide if two words have the same meaning, his decision is faster after repeating one of the words for 1 min. than after repeating an unrelated word. This would appear to be evidence against semantic satiation, for if repetition of a word results in loss of meaning, repetition of a word should make more difficult a decision involving its meaning. But Fillenbaum suggests that continuous elicitation of a word may both lead to changes in meaning and alert S to specific word features, and so either facilitate or impair a decision involving that word.However, Fillenbaum's results do not show that continuous elicitation has these effects, for in his studies the effects of repetition were confounded with those of simple forewarning. When S was asked to repeat one of the decision pair, he knew one of those words in advance; when he repeated an unrelated word, he did not. We do not know whether decision latency was reduced by asking S to repeat one of the decision words or simply by giving him that word prior to the decision.This experiment was conducted to separate the effects of repetition (and hence semantic satiation) and forewarning on decision latency. MethodEach of 16 college students was asked to decide if each of 16 pairs of words had the same meaning, and the latencies of their decisions were recorded. To assess practice effects the pairs were presented in two series

Review of the measurement of semantic satiation.

“…In a similar experiment, Gumenik and Perlmutter (1966), found, in agreement with the results of Gough and Rohrman (1965), that repetition had no effect on decision latency.…”

“…This study, and Fillenbaum's explanation of his findings, have been reviewed and criticized elsewhere (Esposito & Pel ton, 1969). Gough and Rohrman (1965) designed a study in which amount of repetition (1 or 15 seconds) of the satiator word, decision-pair relationship (synonym or unrelated), and amount of practice were varied. They found that giving subjects one of the words of the decision pair as a "satiator" word before they decided if the words of the decision pair were synonymous (the "forewarning" condition) yielded significantly shorter latencies than did using a "satiator" word unrelated to the decision pair.…”

“…Since none of these studies (Gough & Rohrman, 1965;Gumenik & Perlmutter, 1966;Rohrman & Gough, 1967) employed all of Fillenbaum's (1964) conditions, Esposito and Pelton (1969), using Fillenbaum's material from Haagen (1949), attempted to reproduce Fillenbaum's conditions as closely as possible, but without using any satiation treatment. The hypothesis was that his results were due to the semantic relationships among the words and not to semantic satiation.…”

Forewarning, meaning, and semantic decision latency

“…Several eXperiments (Fillenbaum, 1964;Gumenik & Perlmutter, 1965;Gough & Rohrman, 1965) have shown that if someone is asked to decide if a pair of words are synonyms, his decision is greatly facilitated if he is given one of the words in advance. This paper reports two experiments concerned with the explanation of this forewarning effect.…”

“…This paper reports two experiments concerned with the explanation of this forewarning effect. In a previous paper (Gough & Rohrman, 1965) the following explanation was suggested: To compare two words and decide if they have the same meaning, S must compare their meanings. To compare their meanings S must first retrieve them, and it can be assumed that this retrieval process occupies some measurable duration.…”