Associations to unfamiliar words: learning the meanings of new words

Five experiments were designed to examine whether subjects attend to different aspects of meaning for familiar and unfamiliar words. In Experiments 1-3, subjects gave free associations to high- and low-familiarity words from the same taxonomic category (e.g., seltzer: sarsparilla; Experiment 1), from the same noun synonym set (e.g., baby: neonate; Experiment 2), and from the same verb synonym set (e.g., abscond: escape; Experiment 3). In Experiments 4 and 5, subjects first read a context sentence containing the stimulus word and then gave associations; stimuli were novel words or either high- or low-familiarity nouns. Low-familiarity and novel words elicited more nonsemantically based responses (e.g., engram:graham) than did high-familiarity words. Of the responses semantically related to the stimulus, low-familiarity and novel words elicited a higher proportion of definitional responses [category (e.g., sarsparilla:soda), synonym (e.g., neonate:newborn), and coordinate (e.g., armoire: dresser)], whereas high-familiarity stimuli elicited a higher proportion of event-based responses [thematic (e.g., seltzer:glass) and noun:verb (e.g., baby:cry)]. Unfamiliar words appear to elicit a shift of attentional resources from relations useful in understanding the message to relations useful in understanding the meaning of the unfamiliar word.