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The influence of contextual constraints on recall for words within sentences
Elisabeth L McFalls1, Paula J Schwanenflugel
1Department of Psychological and Social Foundations, University of South Florida, 4202 East Fowler Avenue, EDU 162, Tampa, Florida 33620-7750, USA. McFalls@tempest.coedu.usf.edu
Abstract:
Two experiments examined predictions of the relational-distinctive processing view to account for the influence of sentence constraints on memory of target words. In Experiment 1, congruous expected words were recalled better than incongruous words. Words appearing in high-constraint sentences were recalled better than words appearing in low-constraint sentences. In Experiment 2, word expectancy and sentence constraint interacted so that unexpected congruous words appearing in high-constraint sentences were recalled better than their expected counterparts, but this difference was not present for low-constraint sentences. A hybrid model including aspects of the featural restriction model of sentence constraint and the relational-distinctive processing view is proposed.