Priming in item recognition: The organization of propositions in memory for text

Abstract

A priming technique is presented that allows assessment of distances between propositional (idea) units in the memory representations of texts. A representation of the meaning of a paragraph can be obtained by listing the propositions of the paragraph and then connecting those propositions that share an argument. The resulting structure defines different relative distances among propositions. These different distances were reflected in different amounts of priming between words in Experiment 1 and between sentences in Experiment 2. When a test item (word or sentence) was immediately preceded in a list of test items by an item close in meaning structure, response time was faster than when the preceding item was farther away in meaning structure. Control experiments were performed that demonstrated that the priming effect resulted from new connections in memory and not from preexisting semantic relationships. In the discussion, problems with other methods of investigating text structure are discussed.