The role of familiarity in associative recognition of unitized compound word pairs

Abstract

This study examined the effect of unitization and contribution of familiarity in the recognition of word pairs. Compound words were presented as word pairs and were contrasted with noncompound word pairs in an associative recognition task. In Experiments 1 and 2, yes–no recognition hit and false-alarm rates were significantly higher for compound than for noncompound word pairs, with no difference in discrimination in both within- and between-subject comparisons. Experiment 2 also showed that item recognition was reduced for words from compound compared to noncompound word pairs, providing evidence of the unitization of the compound pairs. A two-alternative forced-choice test used in Experiments 3A and 3B provided evidence that the concordant effect for compound word pairs was largely due to familiarity. A discrimination advantage for compound word pairs was also seen in these experiments. Experiment 4A showed that a different pattern of results is seen when repeated noncompound word pairs are compared to compound word pairs. Experiment 4B showed that memory for the individual items of compound word pairs was impaired relative to items in repeated and nonrepeated noncompound word pairs, and Experiment 5 demonstrated that this effect is eliminated when the elements of compound word pairs are not unitized. The concordant pattern seen in yes–no recognition and the discrimination advantage in forced-choice recognition for compound relative to noncompound word pairs is due to greater reliance on familiarity at test when pairs are unitized.

Keywords:

• Associative recognition
• Compound word pairs
• Unitization
• Concordant effect
• Familiarity
• Familiarity-only procedure

Portions of this work were presented at the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society, November 2012, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.

This research was supported by a Discovery Grant from the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada awarded to W. E. Hockley.

Notes

¹Compound words have been distinguished in terms of the relationship between the two lexemes. For example, the modifier (the first word) can define a subclass of the general category denoted by the second word or head noun (e.g., darkroom). The two elements together can also denote a particular kind of unexpressed semantic head (e.g., skinhead or paleface, where the semantic head is “person”). A compound word can also express the “sum” or totality of what the two elements denote (e.g., bittersweet). Compound words are also distinguished as to whether the contribution of the meaning of each lexeme to the compound word is based on its original meaning (transparent) or a shifted meaning (opaque). Both members of a compound can be transparent (e.g., blueberry), the head member can be transparent and the other member opaque (e.g., strawberry), the head member can be can be opaque and the other member transparent (e.g., jailbird), and both members can be opaque (e.g., buttercup). The available evidence indicates that the encoding of familiar unspaced compound words is based on the components, but the meaning of a compound word is not constructed from its separate parts (Frisson, Niswander-Klement, & Pollatsek, 2008).

²Statistical analysis showed that mean confidence for hits was higher for CW (M = 2.82, SD = 0.16) than for NCW pairs (M = 2.71, SD = 0.20), and mean confidence for correct rejections was lower for CW (M = 1.98, SD = 0.40) pairs than for NCW (M = 2.09, SD = 0.41) pairs. Response time for hits was faster for CW (M = 1490 ms, SD = 653) than for NCW pairs (M = 1769 ms, SD = 503), whereas response time for correct rejections did not differ for CW (M = 1987 ms, SD = 659) and NCW pairs (M = 979 ms, SD = 506).

³According to signal detection theory, the two-alternative forced-choice procedure produces a performance advantage over the yes–no procedure of approximately √2. Thus, it has been proposed to divide the forced-choice d′ score by √2 to compensate for this advantage (Hacker & Ratcliff, 1979; Macmillan & Creelman, 1991).

⁴We thought a more direct approach to examine whether test interference due to study and test delay was responsible for the absence of discrimination in yes–no associative recognition test would be to compare discrimination of CW and NCW pairs in the first half to that in the second half of the test lists of Experiment 1. This analysis, however, showed no difference in the mean estimates of d′. The main effect of test list half was not significant [F(1, 29) = 3.58, MSE = 6.67, p = .069, η² = .110], but there was a trend for overall discrimination to increase from the first half (1.38) to the second half (1.86) of the test list. There was no significant main effect of pair type [F(1, 29) = 2.50, MSE = 2.46, p = .125, η² = .079]. Moreover, the interaction between test list half and pair type did not approach significance [F(1, 29) = 0.073, MSE = 0.088, p = .789, η² = .078].