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Determinants of word fragment completion
Author(s) -
OLOFSSON ULRICH,
NYBERG LARS
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9450
pISSN - 0036-5564
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9450.1995.tb00968.x
Subject(s) - fragment (logic) , psychology , word (group theory) , linguistics , natural language processing , cognitive psychology , computer science , algorithm , philosophy
A current debate in the memory literature concerns the validity of word fragment completion (WFC) as a test of implicit memory. It has been claimed that language variables exert a strong influence on the task, and that the task reflects memory only to a small extent (Hintzman & Hartry, 1990). For these reasons, the use of contingency analyses of recognition and WFC performance as a means of studying underlying memory processes has been criticized. The present study addressed this issue by examining the influence of language variables on completion of a set of computer generated single‐solution fragments of Swedish words (Olofsson & Nyberg, 1992). It was found that language variables indeed had a large effect on completion performance, and that priming only accounted for a small portion of variance in the task. It is therefore suggested that the method of triangulation should be employed for contingency analyses involving WFC.