Decision latencies to thematic and nonthematic distractors in prose

Assigned 2 groups of 10 undergraduates each to read short passages of highly metaphorical prose. For 1 group the passages were headed with a title which provided the possibility of organizing the metaphors into a continuous narrative stream. Ss were then given a recognition task using 32 nouns from each of the passages as well as 8 thematically related and 8 unrelated nouns. Latencies to reject distractors were recorded in a test of the hypothesis that possession of the theme should slow rejection of thematically related words. The hypothesis was confirmed, but only for the easier of 2 passages. Results are discussed in terms of the model of recognition memory proposed by J. Hall, R. Sekuler, and W. Cushman (see record). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).