ACKNOWLEDGEMENTIn the course of this research work many have helped me, to whom I can only inadequately express my gratitude.To my advisor, Dr. Wallace E. Lambert, whose careful and constant guidance made completion of this thesis possible, my debt is too great ever to be repaid.
INTRODUCTIONThe normal human perceives his environment as a stable and meaningful world of objects, persons, and events, whereas for a newborn child, the same environment probably appears as an aggregate of meaningless shapes and movements. These differences in perceptions are attributable to differences in experiences and contacts with the environment. Through repeated contacts, the individual gradually learns to perceive stimuli in predictable relations and is able to improve his future reactions to the same or similar stimuli.In other words, perceiving meaningful elements in one's environment consciousness within a few seconds after the fixation began. They also pointed out that the meaning of the word vanished when its proper sound image disappeared, and that the disappearance was due to a shifting of attention from one part of the visually perceived word to another. For instance, for their subjects, the word "castle" became "cast-le", the word "toward" became "to-ward," and so on. They also noticed that with prolonged visual fixation a word may look familiar and yet may cease to have any meaning. The authors, following Titchener, interpreted the findings in terms of the "core-contextn theory of meaning. For them the meaning of a word was determined by the associated ideas (context) that word evokes when presented to the subject. Thus they differentiated "meaning" from "familiarity," and they argued that their experiments clearly demonstrated the fact that familiarity does not necessarily involve associated ideas. In other words, prolonged visual fixation of a word leads to loss of meaning or "associative power" in a word without apparent loss of familiarity.Bassett and Warne (1919) used a continued verbal repetition procedure and found that with repetition the word !ost both its meaning and familiarity. The word after continued repetition appeared devoid of any sense and appeared foreign to their subjects. When the meaning of a word dropped away, subjects reported their experience to be very similar to that of encountering a nonsense syllable or a combination of sounds which was neither familiar nor unfamiliar. Occasionally the subjects reported "a feeling of blankness" probably due to the persistence of the sheer sound of the word. The meaning of the word was thus forced into the -6--background and the word lost its distinctiveness.