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The feeling of knowing a word's meaning
Author(s) -
Eysenck Michael W.
Publication year - 1979
Publication title -
british journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.536
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8295
pISSN - 0007-1269
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1979.tb01681.x
Subject(s) - feeling , psychology , meaning (existential) , semantic differential , word (group theory) , semantics (computer science) , cognitive psychology , linguistics , social psychology , computer science , philosophy , psychotherapist , programming language
Subjects were presented with rare words, and required to define them. Feeling‐of‐knowing judgements were made with respect to meaning of words that could not be defined accurately. It was found that subjects’ feeling‐of‐knowing judgements accurately predicted their performance on semantic‐differential and related‐word tasks designed to measure connotative and denotative aspects of word meaning, respectively. In addition, number of semantically related words recognized was consistently related to both feeling‐of‐knowing judgements and to semantic‐differential performance. It was concluded that feeling‐of‐knowing judgements and their predictive accuracy were result of knowledge of semantic attributes or features.