The effect of reference field organization on language processing

Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada Subjects were exposed to a miniature artificial language in which auditorily presented nonsense words were correlated to a visually presented reference field. Both the organization of the reference field and the order of words were manipulated to test whether subjects were encoding on the basis of an English-based semantic code or a code based on the nonverbal reference field. Results indicated that the code used was based on the organization of the nonverbal reference field.