ASSOCIATIONS TO UNFAMILIAR WORDS - LEARNING THE MEANINGS OF NEW WORDS

Five experiments were designed to examine whether subjects attend to d ifferent aspects of meaning for familiar and unfamiliar words. In Expe riments 1-3, subjects gave free associations to high- and low-familiar ity words from the same taxonomic category (e.g., seltzer:sarsparilla; Experiment 1), from the same noun synonym set (e.g., baby:neonate; Ex periment 2), and from the same verb synonym set (e.g., abscond:escape; Experiment 3). In Experiments 4 and 5, subjects first read a context sentence containing the stimulus word and then gave associations; stim uli were novel words or either high- or low-familiarity nouns. Low-fam iliarity and novel words elicited more nonsemantically based responses (e.g., engram:graham) than did high-familiarity words. Of the respons es semantically related to the stimulus, low-familiarity and novel wor ds elicited a higher proportion of definitional responses [category (e .g., sarsparilla:soda), synonym (e.g., neonate:newborn), and coordinat e (e.g., armoire:dresser)], whereas high-familiarity stimuli elicited a higher proportion of event-based responses [thematic (e.g., seltzer: glass) and noun:verb (e.g., baby:cry)]. Unfamiliar words appear to eli cit a shift of attentional resources from relations useful in understa nding the message to relations useful in understanding the meaning of the unfamiliar word.