Repeated text in unrelated passages: Repetition versus meaning selection effects

Despite previous findings, Klin, Ralano, and Weingartner (2007) found transfer benefits across unrelated passages. After processing an ambiguous phrase in Story A that was biased toward its sarcastic meaning, readers were more likely to interpret the identical phrase in Story B as sarcastic, even though it contained no disambiguating information. In the present experiments, we found both repetition effects (a benefit for the lexical items) and meaning selection effects (a benefit for the selected meaning of the phrase) with short delays between Stories A and B; with longer delays, only repetition effects were found. Whereas decreasing the elaboration of the phrase eliminated both effects, moving the disambiguating context from before to after the phrase eliminated meaning selection effects only. We conclude that meaning selection effects, which are based on conceptual overlap, are more sensitive to context changes and less robust than repetition effects, which are based on both perceptual and conceptual overlap.