The expectation-violation effect: Paradoxical effects of semantic relatedness

JOURNAL OF MEMORY AND LANGUAGE 27, 40-58 (1988)

The Expectation-Violation Effect: Paradoxical Effects of Semantic Relatedness

ELLIOT HIRSHMAN

University of California, Los Angeles

This paper reports an experimental effect, the expectation-violation effect, in which items from weakly related pairs are better recalled than items from strongly related pairs. This effect occurs when strength of relation is defined from associative norms. The experiments presented below define important boundary conditions for the expectation-violation effect. Type of Memory Test, Type of Experimental Design, and Number of Weakly Related Pairs in-the Study List all affect whether the expectation-violation effect will occur. The theoretical explanation of the expectation-violation effect presented herein claims that a failure to understand the relation between the items in a word pair can improve memory performance on that word pair. These failures, which are called blind-alley searches, occur when the items in word pairs represent unexpected or novel semantic combinations. The blind-alley search results in a memory representation, a blind-alley search cue, which can mediate the later retrieval of the word pairs on which the blind-alley search is committed. The expectation-violation effect occurs because weakly related pairs are more likely to represent unexpected or novel semantic combinations than are strongly related pairs. Sub- jects are thus more likely to commit blind-alley searches, with their attendant memory ben- efits, on weakly related pairs than on strongly related pairs. 0 1988 Academic PRSS, Inc.

Highly familiar meaningful stimuli are compatible, by definition, with existing cognitive structures. Such stimuli . . will be processed to a deep level more rap- idly than less meaningful stimuli and will be well re- tained.

-Fergus I. M. Craik and Robert Lockhart (1972)

Semantic relationships among to-be-remembered items facilitate memory for those items. The finding that strongly related materials are better remembered than weakly related materials is ubiquitous. This result has been found in paired-associate and word-list learning (Deese, 1959; McGeoch, 1930; Underwood & Schulz,

The research reported here is a part of a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of California, Los Angeles. The author thanks Professors Rogers Albritton, Ralph E. Geiselman, Murray Glanzer, Eric Holman, Richard Schmidt, Thomas Wickens, and, particularly, Robert A. Bjork (committee chair) for helpful comments and suggestions throughout the course of the research. Reprint requests should be addressed to the author at the Department of Psy- chology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, 8th floor, New York, NY 10003.

1960; Wicklund, Palermo, & Jenkins, 1964); cued recall, free recall, and recognition testing (Hall, 1972; Epstein & McGeoch, 1930; McCullers, 1961; Mandler & Huttenlocher, 1956; Platt, 1964; Turnage, 1963; Voss, 1967); and when nonsense syllables or words are the to-be recalled items (Postman, Adams, & Phillips, 1955; Rode- wald, 1969). Further, these results occur with many different definitions of semantic relatedness. These measures include associative strength as determined in free-association norms, number of associates given to an individual item, frequency of items in the language, and experimenter-defined relations such as taxonomic category and congruity (Bousfield, 1953; Craik & Tulving, 1975; Hall, 1972; Moscovitch and Craik, 1976; Noble, 1952; Postman, 1961; Schulman, 1974; Underwood & Schulz, 1960).

Theoretical explanations of the results center on the idea that semantic knowledge transfers to episodic tasks. Strongly related materials permit more positive transfer

40 0749-596x/88 $3 .OO Copyright 0 1988 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

EXPECTATION-VIOLATION EFFECT 41

from previous learning than do weakly related materials; this knowledge can be used at study to construct elaborations about the to-be-remembered material (Bradshaw & Anderson, 1982) and these elaborations can mediate later recall (Mandler & Hutten- lecher, 1956; Postman et al., 1955).

Despite this persuasive theoretical rationale, there are reasons to expect that weakly related materials will be better remembered than strongly related materials. Both humans and animals respond very strongly to unexpected or novel stimuli (Sokolov, 1968; Whitlow & Wagner, 1984) and weakly related materials often represent unexpected or novel semantic combinations. If subjects respond to the unexpected semantic combinations represented by weakly related materials as they do to other unexpected stimuli, weakly related materials may enjoy a memorial advantage over strongly related materials. There are two plausible ways in which this could occur. First, the response to unexpected stimuli may encourage a more elaborate encoding of weakly related materials, and, second, a memory of the response to unexpected stimuli may mediate later recall of the weakly related materials.

Recently, and consistent with the preceding speculations, Hirshman and Bjork (in press) reported an experiment in which weakly related word pairs were better remembered than strongly related word pairs. Hirshman and Bjork presented subjects with lists of word pairs. These lists contained both strongly related and weakly related word pairs where strength of relation was defined by the number of times a response was given to a stimulus in a free- association task. They found that responses from weakly related pairs were better recalled than responses from strongly related pairs. This result occurred when subjects read or generated the response terms at study. It did not occur in cued recall; in cued recall, responses from strongly related pairs were better recalled than were responses from weakly related pairs.

The above experiment raises the central questions of this paper. Are there well-defined situations in which items from weakly related pairs are better recalled than items from strongly related pairs, and, if so, what are the theoretical implications of such a finding? To begin to investigate these questions, a replication of the “Read” condition of Hirshman and Bjork’s Experiment I was conducted. The experiment presented subjects with pairs of words that were either strongly related or weakly related as defined from free-association norms. After a 5-min retention interval, subjects freely recalled the response terms from the word pairs. Following this, they were given a stimulus-cued recall test for the responses. This experiment attempts to repli- cate the results of Hirshman and Bjork with new materials. While Hirshman and Bjork counterbalanced stimulus terms across strongly related and weakly related pairs, this experiment counterbalances response terms across strongly related and weakly related word pairs. This was done to verify the generality of the Hirshman and Bjork results.

Method

EXPERIMENT 1

Subjects. The subjects were 24 introductory psychology students at the University of California, Los Angeles. They participated in the experiment in partial fulfillment of a research participation class requirement .

Design. A 2 x 2 within-subject factorial design was used with Associative Strength (strongly related pairs vs weakly related pairs) and Type of Test (free recall vs cued recall) as within-subject factors.

Materials. Two alternative lists each comprised of 19 word pairs served as the to-be-remembered materials. A third list comprised of 6 pairs served as a practice list. The 19 response words in each list were the same words presented in the same order, but if a given response word was a strong associate on one list, it was a weak associate on the other list. Strength of as-

42 ELLIOT HIRSHMAN

sociation was determined from published norms (Bilodeau & Howell, 1965; Palermo & Jenkins, 1964). Response words in strongly related pairs are the most fre- quently given associate of the stimulus word. Response words in weakly related pairs are generally very infrequently given associates of the stimulus word. If it was not possible to construct such a pair (i.e., if the response term was not a weak associate of any stimulus term in the norms) the stimulus term in the weakly related pair was chosen so that it was a weak associate of one of the members of the corresponding strongly related pairs. These materials are presented in Appendix A. Long-short is an example of a strongly related pair, while Quick-Short is an example of a weakly related pair.

In one list the odd-numbered response words (in terms of list position) are strong associates and the even-numbered words are weak associates; in the other list the odd-numbered response words are weak associates and the even-numbered words are strong associates. Each of the two alternative lists was presented to half the subjects. Across subjects, therefore, assignment of strong associates and weak associates to list position was counterbalanced. The practice list consisted of three strongly related pairs and three weakly related pairs presented in alternation. For each list, slides were constructed with one word pair per slide. A cued-recall test was constructed for each list by randomly reor- dering the stimulus terms of the word pairs in the list. Subjects wrote the response word in a space provided to the right of the stimulus term.

Procedure. Subjects were tested in groups of three to five persons. Upon en- trance, subjects were seated and handed a note pad. The experimenter told them that they were going to be shown 19 pairs of words on a slide projector, and they were instructed to write each pair on a sheet in their note pad during the 10 s each pair was shown. A “turn” command, spoken by the experimenter, indicated to subjects that

they should turn the page in their note pads and write the new pair on the next page. Subjects were told that there would be a memory test, but the nature of the test was not specified.

A practice list of six items was presented prior to the presentation of the critical list. Subjects then received a l-min cued-recall test on this list. The critical list was then presented and the study phase ran as de- scribed above. Subjects then received a word-search puzzle for 5 min. Following the word-search task, they received a blank sheet and were asked to recall the response word members of the pairs of words they had studied. These sheets were collected after 3 min and the cued-recall test was given. On this test, the stimulus words were presented on a sheet and the subjects were asked to write the response words next to the stimulus words which had ac- companied them on the study list. Subjects were given 3 min for this test.

Results

Table 1 shows the mean proportions of correct responses in free recall and cued recall for responses from strongly related and weakly related pairs. In computing the proportions, the number in the denomi- nator is eight in each case because the first two and the last one of the studied pairs were omitted from the analysis (they were considered primacy and recency items). This left eight strongly related pairs and eight weakly related pairs in the list.

As expected, the main effect of Type of Test was significant (F( 1,23) = 438.59, p < .OOOl). The finding of primary interest is that while recall of responses from strongly

TABLE 1 PR~P~R~~N 0F RESPONSE WORDS RECALLED AS A

FUNCTION OF TYPE OF TEST AND ASSOCIATIVE STRENGTH

Type of test

Free Recall Cued Recall

Strongly related Weakly related pairs pairs

.23 .34

.93 .73


related pairs was superior to recall of responses from weakly related pairs in cued recall (.93 vs .73), the recall of responses from weakly related pairs was superior to recall of responses from strongly related pairs in free recall (.34 vs .23). This interaction between Associative Strength and Type of Test was significant (F(1,23) = 34.05, p C .OOOl). Planned comparisons re- vealed that cued recall of responses from strongly related pairs was significantly greater than cued recall of responses from weakly related pairs (F( 1,23) = 24.3 1, p < .OOl), but free recall of responses from weakly related pairs was significantly greater than free recall of responses from strongly related pairs (F(1,23) = 5.28, p < .05). The latter effect-that items from weakly related word pairs are better free recalled than items from strongly related word pairs- will hereafter be termed an expectation-violation effect to denote that the unexpected (expectation violating) semantic combinations represented by weakly related pairs give weakly related pairs a memorial advantage over strongly related pairs.

DISCUSSION

The finding of an expectation-violation effect in Experiment 1 helps answer one of the questions this report posed. Consistent with the speculation presented in the introduction there are situations in which items from weakly related materials are better remembered than items from strongly related materials. This finding is, apparently, re- stricted to free recall; in cued recall, the traditional advantage of strongly related material over weakly related material still holds. The importance of this interaction for theories of free and cued recall will be taken up in the general discussion. The remaining experiments concentrate on deter- mining the boundary conditions for, and providing a theoretical explanation of, the above-reported expectation-violation effect.

EXPERIMENTS 2,3,4 ANDS To test the generality of the expectation-

violation effect Experiments 2 through 5 included the manipulation of variables that are considered important in learning and memory, but for which there were no expectations that they would affect the expectation-violation effect. In Experiment 2, subjects free recalled the stimulus term instead of the response term. In Experiment 3 the retention interval was increased from 5 to 7 min. Experiment 4 used a generation encoding task (Slamecka & Graf, 1978) instead of a reading encoding task, and Ex- periment 5 used a new set of weakly related pairs, selected so that their average frequency (Thorndike & Lorge, 1944) was lower than the average frequency of the stimulus words from the strongly related pairs. This further constraint imposed on the weakly related pairs in Experiment 5 was designed to provide a dramatic demon- stration of the effect’s robustness.

Method

Subjects. A total of 96 subjects (24 in each experiment) participated in Experi- ments 2-5 in partial fulfillment of an introductory psychology course requirement.

Materials. In Experiments 2-4 the to-be-remembered materials and the coun- terbalancing scheme were the same as in Experiment 1, with the notable exception that no cued-recall test was given. Experi- ment 5 replaced the weakly related pairs of Experiment 1 with a similarly selected set of weakly related pairs. The stimulus terms of these pairs satisfied the above-stated frequency criterion. These materials are presented in Appendix A. As in Experiments 2-4, no cued-recall test was given.

Procedures. With the exception of those changes noted above, the procedures in Experiments 2-5 were the same as in Ex- periment 1.

Results

The results of Experiments 2 through 5

44 ELLIOT HIRSHMAN

uniformly demonstrate expectation-violation effects. Experiment 2 demonstrated that expectation-violation effects also occur for the stimulus members of paired associates. Free recall of stimuli from weakly related pairs was superior to free recall of stimuli from strongly related pairs (.32 vs .24, (F(1,23) = 4.03,~ < .05).

Experiment 3 showed that expectation- violation effects occur at different retention intervals. Responses from weakly related pairs were better free recalled than responses from strongly related pairs (.28 vs .I7 (F(1,23) = 4.83, p < .05). Further performance levels in Experiment 3 are lower than free-recall performance levels in Ex- periment 1 (.29 vs .23).

The large number of generation errors made at study complicate the results of Ex- periment 4. Almost all of these errors occurred when subjects were attempting to generate the responses from weakly related pairs. Of the 18 generation errors, 16 were of this type. When a large number of generation errors occur at study there are two possible analyses, an analysis based on number of presented pairs and an analysis based on number of possible responses. An analysis based on number of presented pairs biases against finding an expectation- violation effect because there are fewer possible responses from weakly related pairs than from strongly related pairs. An analysis based on number of possible responses may bias toward finding an expectation-violation effect because items that are difficult to generate may also be difficult to remember. Both analyses yielded the same result; only the first is presented. Generated responses from weakly related pairs were better free recalled than generated responses from strongly related pairs (.34 vs .20, (F(1,23) = 14.03,~ < .OOOl).

Experiment 5 replaced the weakly related materials from Experiment 1 with a new set of weakly related materials. An expectation-violation effect occurred with these new materials. Responses from

weakly related pairs were better free recalled than responses from strongly related pairs (.31 vs .22, (F(1,23) = 5.69,~ < .05>.

Discussion

The results of Experiments l-5 indicate that items from weakly related pairs are better free recalled than items from strongly related pairs. The effect occurs for both stimuli and responses, at different retention intervals, with different encoding tasks, and with different sets of weakly related materials. Further, the effect occurs even when the average frequency of the stimulus terms from the weakly related pairs is lower than the average frequency of the stimulus terms from the strongly related pairs. This result is particularly dramatic because, to the extent that stimulus recall mediates response recall, these frequency differences work against an expectation-violation effect. This is because the high frequency stimuli from strongly related pairs should be better free recalled than the low frequency stimuli from the weakly related pairs.

The remainder of this paper will concentrate on theoretical explanations of these findings. A first important question concerns the loci of the effect. Does the free- recall advantage of items from weakly related pairs over items from strongly related pairs occur because weakly related pairs are better free recalled than strongly related pairs or does it occur because individual items from weakly related pairs are better recalled as individual items than are individual items from strongly related pairs.

Hayes-Roth (1977) and Yekovich and Manelis (1980) provide a rationale for this latter hypothesis with their suggestion that the free recall of items from word pairs decreases as the strength of the relations among items increases. This framework can explain the expectation-violation effect by claiming that the relations between items in strongly related pairs actual

EXPECTATION-VIOLATIONEFFECT 4.5

hinders the free recall of items within those pairs, while the relations among items in weakly related pairs do not provide such a hindrance. This position predicts that the expectation-violation effect should di- minish if subjects are asked to freely recall word pairs. The same relational deficits which improve the free recall of individual items from weakly related pairs relative to the free recall of ‘individual items from strongly related pairs should hurt the free recall of intact weakly related word pairs relative to intact strongly related word pairs. This is because the lack of a relation between the items in weakly related pairs makes it less likely that they will be recalled as intact pairs. Experiment 6 was designed to test this prediction.

EXPERIMENTS

Method

The method of Experiment 6 duplicated the free recall conditions of Experiment 1 with two exceptions. First, subjects were asked to recall the word pairs instead of the response terms in Experiment 6, and second, there were 32 instead of 24 subjects in Experiment 6.

Results and Discussion

The expectation-violation effect occurred when subjects were asked to recall the strongly related and weakly related word pairs. Weakly related word pairs were better recalled than strongly related word pairs (F(1,31) = 4.62, p < .05, .33 vs .2.5). This result is inconsistent with the above-stated claims that the expectation- violation effect occurs primarily because the semantic relation in strongly related pairs actually hinders the free recall of items from those pairs. It is, however, consistent with the assumption that will be adopted through the rest of this paper that the expectation-violation effect for individual items (stimuli and responses) is primarily a result of encoding and retrieval processes that affect the representation of

word pairs. The following sections attempt to determine which of these processes are responsible for the expectation-violation effect.

One general class of such processes that might be responsible for the expectation- violation effect are those in which the processing accorded one type of word pair changes when the other type of word pair is present in the study list. All explanations of this type claim that the expectation-violation effect should not occur in a between- subjects design because there are no within-list interactions between strongly related and weakly related pairs in a between-subjects design. To test this prediction, Experiment 7 replicated the free-recall conditions of Experiment 1 with a between-subjects design.

EXPERIMENT 7

Method

Subjects. The subjects were 48 introductory psychology students at the University of California, Los Angeles. They participated in the experiment in partial fulfillment of a course requirement.

Design. A one-factor between-subjects design was used with Associative Strength (strongly related vs weakly related pairs) as a between-subjects factor.

Materials. Two alternative lists each comprised of 19 word pairs served as the to-be-remembered materials. One list consisted of the strongly related pairs from Ex- periment 1, while the other list consisted of the weakly related pairs from Experiment 1. The order of the response words was the same as in Experiment 1 and each of the two lists was presented to half the subjects. All other materials were the same as in the free-recall conditions of Experiment 1.

Procedure. The procedure in Experiment 7 duplicated the procedure of the free-recall conditions of Experiment 1 with one exception. In Experiment 7 subjects were randomly assigned to study either the list of strongly related pairs or the list of weakly related pairs.

46 ELLIOT HIRSHMAN

Results

The primary result of Experiment 7 is that the expectation-violation effect does not occur in between-subjects designs. Type of Design critically affects whether an expectation-violation effect occurs. Re- sponses from strongly related pairs were recalled as well as responses from weakly related pairs. In fact, there was a nonsignificant numerical advantage of the strongly related pairs over the weakly related pairs (.29 vs .24, p > .2).

There are two primary differences between the free recall results of Experiment 1 and those of Experiment 7. First, the mean proportion of responses recalled from weakly related pairs is 10% lower in the between-subjects design (Experiment 7) than that in the within-subject design (Experiment 1). Second, the mean proportion of responses recalled from strongly related pairs is 6% higher in the between-subjects design than that in the within-subject design. Weakly related pairs are hurt by a between-subjects design, while strongly related pairs are helped by a between-subjects design. To evaluate the reliability of these findings, two separate analyses of variance were conducted on the scores of the strongly related and weakly related pairs in the two designs. One analysis compared subjects’ performance on weakly related pairs in the within-subject design to their performance on these same pairs in the between-subjects design. A second analysis did the same thing for strongly related pairs. Responses from weakly related pairs were better recalled in the within- subject design than in the between-subjects design (F(1,46) = 4.57, p c .05). While responses from strongly related pairs were better recalled numerically in the between- subjects design than in the within-subject design, this effect did not reach statistical significance (.lO <p < .15). Discussion

The results of Experiment 7 and the analysis of those results presented above sug-

gest two explanations of the expectation- violation effect and why Type of Design critically affects it. Both explanations represent the general idea that the presence of one type of word pair in a study list affects the processing accorded the other type of word pair.

The first explanation focuses on the idea that the presence of the strongly related pairs in a list affects the encoding the weakly related pairs receive. The basis for this idea is that subjects have a criterion for how well encoded word pairs should be at the end of the study phase (Begg & Snider, in press). The presence of strongly related pairs in a list increases the criterion for how well encoded weakly related pairs in that same list should be following study. This encoding-criterion shift increases the amount of encoding subjects give to weakly related pairs which, in turn, increases later memory performance on those pairs. Thus, weakly related pairs are better remembered in the within-subject design than in the between-subjects design and the expectation- violation effect occurs in within-subject designs, but not in between-subjects designs.

The second explanation centers on the idea of retrieval interference. Retrieval interference occurs when the retrieval of some items at test makes it impossible to retrieve other items that otherwise would have been retrieved (see Tblving and Ar- buckle (1963) and Smith (1973) for empirical evidence of retrieval interference.) This explanation claims that the retrieval of weakly related pairs in the within-subject design blocks the retrieval of strongly related pairs that otherwise would have been retrieved. When a between-subjects design is used, and the blockage is removed, performance on strongly-related pairs increases. Theoretical explanations of retrieval interference (Gillund & Shiffrin, 1984; Watkins & Watkins, 1975) claim that retrieval interference occurs because general contextual memory cues (i.e., environ- mental and temporal cues) become less effective, or overloaded, as retrieval pro-

EXPECTATION-VIOLATIONEFFECT 47

ceeds. Experiments 8 and 9 were designed to test these explanations of the expectation-violation effect and its variation with Type of Design.

EXPERIMENTS

Experiment 8 tests the encoding-criterion shift explanation of the expectation- violation effect. This explanation claims that subjects have a criterion that deter- mines how well encoded to-be-remembered word pairs should be following study and that the presence of strongly related word pairs in a study list increases the subject’s criterion for how well encoded weakly related word pairs should be. Experiment 8 tests the encoding-criterion shift explanation of the expectation-violation effect by presenting the strongly related and weakly related pairs in separate blocks of word pairs in the study list and manipulating whether the block of weakly related pairs precedes the block of strongly related pairs. That is, Serial Position of block of weakly related word pairs, as well as Asso- ciative Strength, is a factor in Experiment 8. Some subjects receive the block of weakly related pairs before the block of strongly reIated pairs, whiIe other subjects receive the block of strongly related pairs before the block of weakly related pairs. If an encoding-criterion shift causes the expectation-violation effect, the expectation- violation effect should be smaller for those subjects who receive the block of weakly related pairs before the block of strongly related pairs than for those subjects who receive the block of strongly related pairs before they receive the block of weakly related pairs. This is because it is impossible for subjects who receive the weakly related pairs first to have an encoding-criterion shift. They do not even know that there are strongly related pairs in the list when they are encoding the weakly related pairs.

Method

Subjects. The subjects were 48 introductory psychology students at the University

of California, Los Angeles. They participated in partial fulfillment of a course requirement .

Design. A two-factor mixed factorial design was used with Associative Strength (strongly related vs weakly related pairs) as a within-subject factor and Serial Position of the block of weakly related pairs (first block vs second block) as a between-subjects factor.

Materials. Four alternative lists each comprised of 19 word pairs served as the to-be-remembered materials. Two of these four lists defined the “first block”(weakly related pairs first) condition of the between-subjects factor, while the other two lists defined the “second block” (weakly related pairs second) condition of this factor. The word pairs used in these lists were the same as those used in the lists of Experiment 1. In two of the four lists used in Experiment 8, the response words were the same words presented in the same order as in the lists used in Experiment 1. These two lists differed, however, in that in one of these lists the first 10 word pairs were weakly related word pairs and the last 9 word pairs were strongly related word pairs, whiIe in the second of these Iists the first 10 word pairs were strongly related word pairs and the last 9 word pairs were weakly related word pairs. The other two lists were formed from these lists, one from each list, by switching the serial positions of the blocks of strongly related and weakly related pairs in the given list. Each of the four alternative lists was presented to one- quarter of the subjects. This procedure ensured that a given response word was presented equally often in all four experimental conditions. All other materials were the same as in the free-recall conditions of Experiment 1.

Procedure. The procedure of Experi- ment 8 duplicated the procedure of the free-recall conditions of Experiment 1 with one exception. Subjects in Experiment 8 were randomly assigned to conditions of the between-subjects factor.

48 ELLIOT HIRSHMAN

TABLE 2 PROP~RTIONOFWORLXRECAL.LEDINEXPERIMENT ~ASAFUNCTIONOFASSOCIATIVESTRENGTHAND

SERIALPOSITIONOFBLOCKOF WEAKLY RELATED PAIRS

Serial position of block

Weakly related

Strongly related Weakly related pairs pairs

pairs first Weakly related

.22 .37

pairs second .29 .42


Table 2 reports the results of Experiment 8. As expected there was a main effect of Associative Strength (F(1,46) = 15.28, p < .OOl, .39 vs .25). The primary result of Ex- periment 8 is that the effect of Associative Strength does not interact with the Serial Position of the block of weakly related pairs (F < 1). Presenting weakly related pairs before strongly related pairs produced an expectation-violation effect of the same size as when strongly related pairs were presented before weakly related pairs.

Apparently, a shift in the subject’s encoding criterion is not responsible for the expectation-violation effect since the expectation-violation effect is the same size whether or not subjects know strongly related pairs are in the list when they are encoding weakly related pairs. A secondary result is that there was not an effect of the Serial Position of the block of weakly related pairs (p > .25). Incidentally, the results of Experiment 8 also indicate that the alternating presentation used in Experi- ments l-5, and any attentional sharing between strongly related and weakly related word pairs that may have resulted from this alternating presentation is not responsible for the expectation-violation effect.

EXPERIMENT 9

Experiment 9 was designed to test the retrieval-interference explanation of the expectation-violation effect. The retrieval- interference explanation of the expectation-violation effect claims that the

retrieval of weakly related pairs blocks the retrieval of strongly related pairs that would otherwise have been retrieved. This occurs because as retrieval proceeds, general contextual cues are “weakened” and become ineffective as retrieval cues for strongly related pairs. This means weakly related pairs are making more use of general contextual cues than are strongly related pairs. If we assume that additional general contextual cues are more beneficial to pairs that are not currently using contextual cues than to pairs that are currently using these cues, then additional general contextual cues should aid the retrieval of strongly related pairs more than the retrieval of weakly related pairs, which should reduce the expectation-violation effect.

The recent work of Glenberg and Swanson (1986) illustrates a way to provide additional general contextual-retrieval cues. Glenberg and Swanson demonstrated that temporal segregation can aid the retrieval of items presented in specific time periods. A plausible interpretation of this finding is that temporal segregation creates additional general contextual-retrieval cues and these cues aid the retrieval of items presented in a given time period.

If temporal segregation creates additional general contextual cues, then temporal segregation of strongly related and weakly related pairs in a given list will create additional general retrieval cues for strongly related and weakly related pairs. According to the foregoing arguments, this should increase performance on strongly related pairs and thus reduce the expectation-violation effect. Experiment 9 tested these ideas by temporally segregating blocks of strongly related and weakly related pairs. A 10-s blank slide was presented between blocks of strongly related and weakly related word pairs to accom- plish this.

Method

Subjects. The subjects were 24 introduc-


tory psychology students at the University of California, Los Angeles. They participated in the experiment in partial fulfillment of a class requirement.

Design. A one-factor within-subject design was used with Associative Strength (strongly related vs weakly related pairs) as a within-subject factor.

Materials. Two alternative lists each comprised of 19 word pairs served as the to-be-remembered materials. These lists used the same word pairs as those used in Experiment 1 and the order of response words was the same as in Experiment 1. These lists, however, differed from those used in Experiment 1 in two respects. First, the two lists of to-be-remembered word pairs used in Experiment 9 were comprised of blocks of strongly related and weakly related word pairs. In one list, the first 10 word pairs were weakly related pairs and the last 9 word pairs were strongly related pairs while in the second list, the first 10 word pairs were strongly related pairs and the last 9 word pairs were weakly related pairs. Second, a blank slide was presented for 10 s between the blocks of strongly related and those of weakly related word pairs in both lists. This list construction ensured that any to-be-recalled response word which was a member of a strongly related pair in one list was a member of a weakly related pair in the other list, and since each of the two alternative lists was presented to half the subjects, assignment of response words from strongly related and weakly related pairs to list position was counterbalanced across subjects. All other materials were the same as in the free-recall conditions of Experi- ment 1.

Procedure. The procedure in Experiment 9 duplicated the procedure in the free-recall conditions of Experiment 1 with three exceptions. First, strongly related and weakly related pairs were presented in blocks, instead of alternately, and second a blank slide was presented for 10 s between the blocks of strongly related and weakly related word pairs. Third, subjects were in-

formed prior to the study phase that a blank slide would appear for 10 s in the middle of the list and that the blank slide was included in the study list to provide a brief rest period during the study task.


The primary result of Experiment 9 was that there was no expectation-violation effect (F < 1.05) because the manipulation employed in Experiment 9 increased performance on strongly related pairs. Perfor- mance on weakly related pairs was .32, similar to previous within-subject design experiments presented in this paper, while performance on strongly related pairs was .28, which is numerically greater than performance on strongly related pairs in other within-subject design experiments presented in this paper. This result provides support for the retrieval-interference explanation of the expectation-violation effect. Assuming that additional general contextual cues are more helpful than the fewer general contextual cues a word pair previously used, the increase in performance on strongly related pairs relative to performance on weakly related pairs in Experi- ment 9 implies strongly related pairs used fewer general contextual cues at test than did weakly related pairs in previous experiments. This implication is consistent with the retrieval-interference explanation of the expectation-violation effect.

One troubling aspect of the results of Ex- periment 9 is that the blank slide may act simply to segregate the strongly related and weakly related pairs into two separate lists. Thus, Experiment 9 might act simply as a replication of the between-subjects design used in Experiment 6. If the blank slide acts to segregate the list into two halves, responses from strongly related pairs im- mediately following the slide in Experiment 9 should be better recalled than responses from strongly related pairs in the corresponding serial positions in a control experiment in which there is no blank slide. This is because the strongly related word pairs following the blank slide in Experi-

50 ELLIOT HIRSHMAN

ment 9 should benefit from primacy or “begin again” effects. A control experiment was run and the results of this experiment were compared to those of Experi- ment 9 to see if such “begin again” effects occurred in Experiment 9. The control experiment replicated Experiment 9 exactly, except there was no 10-s blank slide nor were there any instructions related to the slide. The control experiment produced a normal expectation-violation effect (F(1,23) = 8.03, p < .Ol, .32 vs .21) and, more importantly, while the responses from the first three strongly related pairs following the blank slide constituted 37% of the strongly related items recalled in the control experiment, they only constituted 29% of the strongly related items recalled in Experiment 9. The results of Experiment 9 do not appear to be due to “begin again” effects.

In addition to explaining the results of Experiment 9, the retrieval-interference explanation of the expectation-violation effect also explains why performance on strongly related pairs in between-subjects designs is larger numerically than performance on strongly related pairs in within- subject designs. In within-subject designs the retrieval of weakly related pairs blocks the retrieval of strongly related pairs that otherwise would have been retrieved. This retrieval interference is removed in the between-subjects design and, consequently, performance on strongly related pairs increases in the between-subjects design. In- terestingly, performance on strongly related pairs in Experiment 9 is almost equal to performance on strongly related pairs in Experiment 6 in which a between-subjects design is used.

The retrieval-interference explanation of the expectation-violation effect leaves two theoretical issues unresolved. First, while the construct of retrieval interference seems necessary to explain the expectation-violation effect, it is not sufficient to explain the expectation-violation effect since it does not explain why weakly related pairs have a retrieval advantage over

strongly related pairs in the first place. Second, the question of why performance on weakly related pairs is lower in the between-subjects design than in the within- subject design is still unanswered. The next section turns to these issues.

Differential Encoding of Strongly Related and Weakly Related Pairs

The introduction to this paper presented the ideas that weakly related pairs represented unexpected semantic combinations and subjects’ responses to these unexpected semantic combinations could mediate memory of weakly related pairs. This section elaborates and specifies this hypothesis by describing the encoding processes subjects perform on weakly related word pairs which are responsible for the retrieval advantage weakly related pairs enjoy over strongly related pairs in the experiments presented above.

A primary assumption is that when subjects attempt to encode pairs of words for later recall, they attempt to semantically relate the items in the pair. This can be conceived of as an attempt to search the attributes of both items in semantic memory to find attributes common to both items (Collins and Quillian, 1969; Sternberg, 1966). When such attributes are found, these constitute a relation between the two items, and this relation is stored as part of an episodic memory. When subjects fail to find such a relation, a process hereafter re- ferred to as a blind-alley search, a response akin to a surprise or novelty response, occurs; expectations are violated.

Just as the discovery of a relation among items affects the memory system, so, it is claimed here, does the failure to discover a relation. There are two possible mecha- nisms for this effect. First, the blind-alley search may cause subjects to pursue a more extensive search in semantic memory to attempt to relate the items in the pair and the semantic elaborations which result from this attempt may mediate later memory. Second, a memory of the blind- alley search and the ensuing surprise re-

EXPECTATION-VIOLATIONEFFECT 51

sponse could become associated to the episodic trace of the to-be-remembered word pair and could act as a retrieval cue on a later test.

A second claim related to the foregoing discussion is that differences in the number of blind-alley searches committed on strongly related and weakly related word pairs are responsible for the retrieval advantage weakly related pairs enjoy over strongly related pairs in the previous experiments in this paper. Subjects are more likely to commit blind-alley searches on weakly related pairs than on strongly related pairs and the memory representations which result from these additional blind- alley searches give weakly related pairs a retrieval advantage over strongly related pairs. This is the effect of expectation violation.

Experiments 10 and 11 provide empirical tests of the related ideas that blind-alley searches can improve memory performance and that such searches are responsible for the retrieval advantage weakly related pairs enjoy over strongly related pairs in free recall in the above experiments. Ex- periment 10 compares performance on two types of word pairs for which the probability of committing a blind-alley search differs, while Experiment 11 attempts to show that the expectation-violation effect disappears when the probability of committing a blind-alley search on strongly related and weakly related pairs is equated.

EXPERIMENT 10

As mentioned above, Experiment 10 compared performance on two types of word pairs for which the probability of committing a blind-alley search differs. The stimuli in these word pairs were homographs. In one type of pair used in Experi- ment 10, the response word corresponded to the dominant sense of the homograph. In the other type of pair used in Experiment 10, the response word corresponded to the nondominant sense of the homograph. The two types of pairs, were, however, selected

to be of equal associative strength (Cramer, 1970). These pairs were presented in lists that contained some of the strongly related pairs from the previous experiments in this paper. This was done to bias processing so that subjects would focus on the dominant sense of any give homograph (Yates, 1978). Given such processing, subjects are more likely to commit blind-alley searches when the responses dictate nondominant senses of the homograph than when the responses dictate dominant senses of the homograph. This is because focusing on the dominant sense of the homograph is more likely to lead to the accessing of an inappropriate sense of the stimulus term (and a conse- quent blind-alley search) in the case of word pairs which represent nondominant senses of the homograph than in the case of word pairs which represent the dominant sense of the homograph. If blind-alley searches improve memory performance, then the stimuli from the word pairs which use a nondominant sense of the homograph should be better recalled than the stimuli from the word pairs which use a dominant sense of the homograph.

Method

Subjects. The subjects were 24 introductory psychology students at the University of California, Los Angeles. They participated in the experiment in partial fulfillment of a research participation class requirement .

Design. A one-factor within-subject design was used with Type of Homographic sense (dominant vs nondominant) as a within-subject factor.

Materials. Two alternative lists each comprised of 19 word pairs served as the to-be-remembered word pairs. In each list serial positions 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, and 19 were filled by the corresponding strongly related pairs from the list of strongly related pairs used in Experiment 6. The remaining 10 serial positions were filled with pairs with homographic stimuli. The stimuli of these pairs were the same in

52 ELLIOTHIRSHMAN

both lists. However, if in one list a stimulus term was paired with a response word which biased its nondominant sense, in the other list it was paired with a response word which biased its dominant sense. For any given stimulus term, both responses were of exactly equal normative strength (Cramer, 1970). These materials are presented in Appendix B. In one list the stimulus words in serial positions 4, 7, 10, 13, and 16 were biased to their dominant sense, while those in serial positions 5, 8, 11, 14, and 17 were biased to their nondominant senses. The reverse was true in the other list. Each of the two alternative lists was presented to half the subjects. Across subjects, therefore, assignment of word pairs that bias dominant and nondominant senses of the homograph to list position was counterbalanced. All other materials were the same as in the free-recall conditions of Experiment 1.

Procedure. The procedure of Experi- ment IO duplicated the procedure of the free-recall conditions of Experiment 1 with one exception: subjects were asked to freely recall the stimulus word instead of the response word in Experiment 10.


The primary result of Experiment 10 is that stimulus words that use a nondominant sense of a homograph are better remembered than stimulus words which use a dominant sense of a homograph (F(1,23) = 8.02, p < .Ol, .46 vs .28). A replication of Experiment 10 produced similar results (F(l,lS) = 7.15, p < .Ol, .39 vs .19). These dramatic results provide strong support for the idea that blind-alley searches improve later memory performance and establishes the blind-alley search hypothesis as a plausible explanation of the retrieval advantage weakly related pairs enjoy over strongly related pairs in free recall. Experiment 11 pursues this idea further by comparing performance on strongly related and weakly related pairs when the probability of com-

mitting a blind-alley search on these two types of pairs is equated.

EXPERIMENT 11

Experiment 11 attempted to equate the number of blind-alley searches subjects commit on strongly related and weakly related word pairs by using lists of word pairs in which the members of every word pair had the same general relation. Every word pair in Experiment 11, with the exception of the primacy and recency pairs, consisted of a noun and an adjective describing that noun. This should make it easier for subjects to determine how the items in the weakly related pairs are related, thus re- ducing the subject’s probability of committing blind-alley searches on weakly related pairs. As previously, Associative Strength was manipulated within-subject. In some pairs the adjective was strongly related to the noun, while in other pairs the adjective was weakly related to the noun (e.g., knife-sharp, ice-sharp). Degree of Association was not, however, expected to be importad, because the effect of Asso- ciative Strength is presumed to depend on the subjects committing more blind-ahey searches on weakly related pairs than on strongly related pairs and the list structure of Experiment 11 is presumed to remove this difference.

Method

Subjects. The subjects were 24 int&c- tory psychology students at the University of California, Los Angeles. They participated in the experiment in partial fu&W ment of a research participation c&s requirement.

Design. A one-factor within-subject design was used with Associative Strength (strongly related vs weakly related*pairs) as a within-subject variable.

Materials. Two alternative lists each comprised of 1~9 word pairs served as the to-be-remembered materials. Strongly related and weakly related word pairs were selected from the Underwood and Bichard-


son (1958) adjective-noun pair norms by the same criteria as were the materials in Experiment 1. These materials are presented in Appendix C. Strongly related and we&y related pairs were presented as in Experiment 1. All other materials were the same as in the free-recall conditions of Ex- periment 1.

Procedure. The procedure of Experi- ment 11 duplicated the procedure of the free-recall conditions of Experiment 1.


The primary result of Experiment 11 was that there was no difference between the recall of responses from strongly related pairs and the recall of responses from weakly related pairs when the number of blind-alley searches committed on weakly related pairs was reduced (F < 1). There is even a nonsignificant numerical advantage of responses from strongly related pairs over responses from weakly related pairs (.32 vs .30).

Together with the results of Experiment 10, the results of Experiment 11 provide strong evidence that blind-alley searches, in&id failures to understand the relation between the items in a pair, are responsible for @he retrieval advantage weakly related pairs enjoy over strongly related pairs in free recall. Thus, the results of Experiment 9 through Ii specify two necessary conditions for the occurrence of the expectation- violation effect, neither of which is sufficient to cause the effect by itself. First, subjects must commit more bli-nd-alley searches on weakly related pairs than on strongly related pairs and ehen the test conditions must be such that the retrieval of weakly related pairs can interfere with the retrieval of strongly related pairs.

Why do the blind-alley searches committed on weakly related pairs at encoding give weakiy related pairs a retrieval advantage over strongly related pairs at retrieval? Two possibilities were presented earlier. The occurrence of blind-al,ley searches might encourage a more extensive en-

coding on those pairs on which the blind- alley searches were committed. Weakly related pairs would then be more extensively elaborated than strongly related pairs at study and this would lead to a retrieval advantage at subsequent testing. A second possibility is that a memory of the blind- alley search and the resultant surprise response could be saved, and this cue, hereafter called a blind-alley search cue, could be used to aid the retrieval of the word pairs to which it was associated.

The second possible mechanism for the effects of the blind-alley search, that a blind-alley search cue can act as a retrieval cue to aid the retrieval of items associated with it, provides, in conjunction with the idea of cue overload (Watkins & Watkins, 1975), an answer to the previously unanswered question of why performance on weakly related pairs is lower in the between-subjects design than in the within- subject design. Subjects in the weakly related pairs condition of the between-subjects design receive twice as many weakly related pairs as do subjects in the within- subject design. Consequently, the blind- alley search cue is, on average, associated to twice as many word pairs in the between-subjects design as in the within-subject design. The blind-alley search cue is, thus, more likely to be overloaded and less likely to be effective as a retrieval cue in the between-subjects design than in the within-subject design.

This description of the effects of the blind-alley search cue predicts that the expectation-violation effect should, within certain ranges, be sensitive to the number of weakly related pairs in the study list because performance on weakly related pairs should be an inverse function of the number of weakly related pairs in the study list. This is because as the number of weakly related pairs in the study lists increases so does the number of word pairs associated with the blind-alley search cue. This cue overload reduces the effectiveness of the blind-alley search cue and there is a

54 ELLIOT HIRSHMAN

corresponding decrease in performance on weakly related pairs and in the size of the expectation-violation effect. Experiments 12 and 13 were designed to test these con- tentions.

EXPERIMENTS 12 AND 13 Experiment 12 and 13 were designed to

study the effect of the number of weakly related pairs in the study list on the size of the expectation-violation effect. Experi- ment 12 presented subjects with lists of word pairs containing 4 weakly related word pairs and 12 strongly related word pairs. Experiment 13 presented subjects with lists of word pairs containing 12 weakly related word pairs and 4 strongly related word pairs. If the blind-alley search cue acts as a retrieval cue it should be more effective in cueing the retrieval of weakly related pairs when there are 4 weakly related pairs in the study list than when there are 12 weakly related pairs in the study list. This implies that the expectation-violation effect will be larger in Experiment 12 than in Experiment 13 because performance on weakly related pairs will be greater in Ex- periment 12 than in Experiment 13.

Method

Subjects. Thirty-six subjects participated in each of Experiments 12 and 13. These subjects were introductory psychology students at the University of California, Los Angeles. They participated in the experiment in partial fulfillment of a research participation class requirement.

Design. Associative Strength (strongly related pairs vs weakly related pairs) was manipulated as a within-subject factor in Experiments 12 and 13.

Materials. Four lists were used in each of Experiments 12 and 13. The four lists used in Experiments 12 and 13 were of the same general form as those used in Experi- ment 1. They differed notably from previous lists, however, in that each of the four lists used in Experiment 12 had 4 weakly related pairs and 12 strongly related

pairs as the to-be-scored pairs and each of the four lists used in Experiment 13 had 12 weakly related pairs and 4 strongly related pairs as the to-be-scored pairs. The four weakly related pairs were different pairs in different serial positions in each of the lists used in Experiment 12. In list 1 they were the weakly related pairs from serial positions 3, 7, 11, and 15 from the lists used in Experiment 1. In list 2 they were the similarly selected pairs from serial positions 4, 8, 12, and 16 from the lists used in Experi- ment 1, and so on for the other two lists. This list construction ensured that the to-be-recalled items and the serial positions of those items were counterbalanced across strongly related and weakly related pairs in Experiment 12. The same counter- balancing scheme was used in Experiment 13 with the notable exception that it was the four strongly related pairs that were in serial positions 3, 7, 11, and 15 in list 1, in serial positions 4, 8, 12, and 16 in list 2, and so on for the other two lists. All other materials used in Experiments 12 and 13 were identical to those used in the free-recall conditions of Experiment 1.

Procedures

The procedures in Experiments 12 and 13 were identical to the procedures in the free-recall conditions of Experiment 1.


The mean proportions of responses cor- rectly recalled in Experiments 12 and 13 are presented in Table 3. In Experiment 12, where there were 4 weakly related pairs and 12 strongly related pairs in the study list, the expectation-violation effect occurred and was numerically larger than any of those found in previous experiments reported in this paper (F(1,35) = 14.43, p < .OOl, .40 vs .24). In Experiment 13 where there were 12 weakly related pairs and 4 strongly related pairs the expectation-violation effect did not occur (F < 1, .29 vs .25). Across-experiment comparisons indicated that responses from weakly related


TABLE 3 PROP~RTIONOF WORDS RECALLEDASAFUNCTIONOFASSOCIATIVESTRENGTHINEXPERIMENTS 12 AND I3

Experiment Strongly related pairs Weakly related pairs

Experiment 12 (4 weakly related pairs) .24 .40 Experiment 13 (12 weakly related pairs) .25 .29

pairs were better recalled in Experiment 12 than in Experiment 13 (F( 1,70) = 7.65, p < .Ol) but that recall of responses from strongly related pairs was the same in the two experiments (F < 1).

These results are consistent with the claim that the blind-alley search cue mediates the retrieval of weakly related pairs and is responsible for the retrieval advantage that weakly related pairs enjoy over strongly related pairs. When the number of weakly related pairs in the study list increases, the blind-alley search cue is associated with more word pairs and is less effective. When the number of weakly related pairs in the study list decreases, the blind-alley search cue is associated with fewer word pairs and is more effective. These vicissitudes in the effectiveness of the blind-alley search cue affect performance on weakly related pairs and the size of the expectation-violation effect. Perfor- mance on strongly related pairs does not evidence such a pattern. This is presum- ably because no single type of cue mediates the recall of strongly related pairs.

GENERAL DISCUSSION

The expectation-violation effect emerges from the preceding experiments as a large and replicable effect with well-defined boundary conditions. The expectation-violation effect occurred 10 times in the preceding experiments with an average size of 11.4%. Type of Test, Type of Experimental Design, and number of weakly related pairs in the study list all set boundary conditions on the effect. The expectation-violation effect occurs in free recall, but not in cued recall and in within-subject designs and not in between-subjects designs. Further, the

expectation-violation effect will not occur if the number of weakly related pairs in the study list is too large.

The theoretical impetus for the initial experiments presented in this paper was the recognition that weakly related pairs represented unexpected semantic combinations and that the subject’s responses to these semantic combinations could improve memory performance on weakly related pairs. These general ideas were specified by using the idea of the blind-alley search and its attendant memory representation, the blind-alley search cue. Differences in the number of blind-alley searches between strongly related and weakly related pairs is one of the necessary conditions of the expectation-violation effect. Subjects must commit more blind-alley searches on weakly related pairs than on strongly related pairs if the expectation-violation effect is to occur. A second necessary condition of the expectation-violation effect, which highlights its dependency on the factors of Type of Test and Type of Design, is that the retrieval of weakly related pairs must interfere with the retrieval of strongly related pairs that otherwise would have been retrieved. This retrieval advantage of weakly related pairs over strongly related pairs occurs because subjects can use a memory of the blind-alley search and the resultant surprise response (called a blind- alley search cue) to cue the retrieval of weakly related pairs that are associated with the blind-alley search cue.

This novel formulation of the role of blind-alley search cues in facilitating memory performance raises the question of whether the blind-alley search cue is sufft- cient to mediate the retrieval of word pairs.

56 ELLIOT HIRSHMAN

Hunt and Elliott’s (1980) description of the roles of semantic and nonsemantic cues in retrieval claims that nonsemantic information is effective only when used in conjunction with semantic information. This position predicts that the expectation-violation effect should disappear if the items in weakly related pairs are exceptionally weakly related. This is because subjects cannot semantically elaborate exceptionally weakly related pairs at study and the blind-alley search cue, a nonsemantic cue, is not sufficient to mediate the retrieval of exceptionally weakly related pairs in the absence of such elaborations. Consistent with these specuiations, a recently com- pleted experiment established that the expectation-violation effect does not occur when the items in weakly related pairs are exceptionally weakly related.

The empirical findings presented in this report have theoretical implications in addition to those presented above. First, these findings indicate that there is no simple relationship between associative strength and memory performance. This can be seen in two ways. First, the effects of associative strength are different on different memory tests. Response terms from weakly related pairs were better free recalled than response terms from strongly related pairs, but the reverse was true in cued recall. Second, on a given test, the effects of associative strength will be different when a different experimental design is used. Responses from weakly related pairs were better free recalled than responses from strongly related pairs when a within-subject design was used, but this was not true when a between-subjects design was used.

A second implication of the above findings concerns the relationship between cued recall and free recall. In Experiment 1, as mentioned above, responses from weakly related pairs were better free recalled than responses from strongly related pairs, but the reverse was true in cued re-

call. This interaction of associative strength and type of test can only occur if cued recall of responses uses relational information that is not used in free recall of responses. Spector and Laughery (1975) and Burke and Battig (1968) present evidence consistent with this claim, They show that associative pretraining manipula- tions which increase relational information increase cued recall of responses, but they do not increase free recall of responses. Two speculations are offered to explain the difference between the information used in free recall and that in cued recall. First, cued recall may be able to use information that is automatically encoded (Barsalou, 1982) while free recall may be more dependent on consciously constructed elaborations. Second, free recall may be more dependent on episodic information than cued recall. Subjects may be able to use general semantic information that was not episodi- cally encoded on a cued recall task (Bahrick, 1970).

A final issue concerns the ecological va- lidity of the current research and previous research. While the theory presented herein describes when associative strength will have positive or negative effects on memory performance it does not specify which set of experimental circumstances- those of this report or those of previous ex- perimenters- are more common outside the laboratory. While this issue is not easily resolvable there are strong reasons to expect that the situation represented in the current experiments is fairly common outside the laboratory. For each word there are many more words that are weakly related to it than there are words that are strongly or intermediately related to it, and the complexity of linguistic processes en- sures that these weakly related pairs are often represented together in the context of other strongly related materials. An example suffices to close. Fairy tales in which step-daughters go to balls bring slippers and glass together.

APPENDIX A APPENDIX C-Continued

Weakly related stimuli

Color Patch Couch Swift Glue Brave Bright Leaf Ruler Quick Blade Rabbit Pray Mate Glass Roll Head Worm Room

Lists of Word Pairs

Weakly related Strongly stimuli related

(Expt 5) stimuli

Color Grass Patch Cabbage Snore Bed Mule Fast Wicker Table Patient Strong Baboon Dumb Bright Stem Tyrant King Worm Long Hurt Scissors Wooly Lamb Hunger Want Spouse Man Head Soft Smelly Carpet Study Mind Flying Insect Room House

Responses

Green Lettuce Sleep Slow Chair Weak Stupid Flower Queen Short cut Sheep Need Woman Hard Rug Think Bug Home

Strongly related noun stimuli

Nail Crystal Crumb City Ape Sugar Knife Night Weight Garbage Milk

Weakly related noun stimuli

Head Diamond Tack Camel Cat Apple Ice Skunk Car Cabbage Fang

Adjective responses

- Hard Clear Small Big Hairy Sweet Sharp Dark Heavy Smelly White

-

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The expectation-violation effect: Paradoxical effects of semantic relatedness