Abstract

Subjects heard stories which contained general verbs (e.g., "give"). For half of the subjects, additional semantic information was included in each story. The hypothesis was that this additional information would combine with the meanings of the general verbs to produce the meanings of more specific verbs (e.g., "pay"). In a fill-in-the-blank recall task, subjects who had heard the extra material recalled these erroneous specific verbs often, while subjects who had not heard the extra material recalled the general verbs. These results are interpreted as providing evidence for integration of the semantic components of verbs from different parts of the passage.