Volume 40, Number 1, 37-51, DOI: 10.1007/BF00308462

Levels of processing of normal and ambiguous sentences in different contexts

Michael Bock

View Related Documents

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to investigate the effect of depth of semantic analysis on the recall of sentences presented for comprehension. The depth of semantic analysis was varied by presenting 48 subjects with 24 unambiguous or lexically ambiguous sentences that were either preceded by a picture or not. Each picture showed either one or both interpretations of the respective ambiguous sentence. The sentence remained on display until the subject had pressed a key to indicate that he had understood its meaning. After the presentation of all the sentences the subjects were tested for recall. Ambiguous sentences were equally well understood as unambiguous sentences, but were better recalled when their ambiguity had been noticed. The subject's awareness of sentence ambiguity, and hence the depth of semantic analysis, was found to depend on the pictorial context in which the sentences were presentend. The pictorial context was also found to affect the depth of processing of unambiguous sentences, which, when presented without a picture, were more time-consuming in comprehension and less well recalled than when preceded by a picture. These findings provide the background for a discussion of the interrelations between the comprehension of sentences, the depth of their semantic processing, and the recall of these sentences.
The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Lorenz Sichelschmidt in collecting and analyzing data and B. Jankowski in the translation of this paper from an original German version

Fulltext Preview

Image of the first page of the fulltext document