Word Stems as Cues in Recall and Completion Tasks

Abstract

Subjects tend to complete word stems to form words to which they have recently been exposed. These priming effects in word-stem completion are compared to cued recall, where subjects are asked to recall list items and are given word stems as cues. Intentionality of learning and duration of rehearsal affected recall performance but not the magnitude of priming in word-stem completion. However, cued recall and word-stem tasks did not exhibit stochastic independence: performance on one task was strongly related to performance on the other. These results are inconsistent with extreme accounts that would attribute performance on these tasks either to entirely separate systems or to an identical set of processes.