FALSE POSITIVES IN RECOGNITION MEMORY PRODUCED BY COHORT ACTIVATION

Cohort theory in spoken-word recognition assumes that a cohort of word candidates consistent with incoming sensory information is activated implicitly as a spoken sound stimulus unfolds over time. Five experime nts examined implications of this internal-generation-of-words mechani sm. In Experiments 1 and 2, a ''base'' word was disqualified (the sens ory information was no longer consistent with the word) either early o r late in the presentation of a spoken stimulus. On a later recognitio n-memory test, significantly more false-positive errors occurred to ba se words following presentations of study items that had late, compare d to early, disqualification points. Experiments 3-5 tested whether th is phenomenon could be accounted for in terms of overlapping features between non-word stimuli and their base words or in terms of a post-id entification processing mechanism. Experiment 3 replicated Experiments 1 and 2, and demonstrated that differences in early and late disquali fication points for non-word targets, unlike word targets, were not re lated to false-positive recognition memory errors. The study inter-ite m interval in Experiment 4 was reduced to 1 s to minimize the role of post-identification processing activities, and the results for both wo rd and non-word targets were consistent with Experiment 3. A word-asso ciation task in Experiment 5 revealed that the late non-word derivatio ns used in this research were on the average more effective stimuli th an the early non-word derivations in eliciting their base words. Howev er, even when comparisons were restricted to item sets with early and late non-words that were equally effective in eliciting base words, fa lse-positive recognition memory errors to target words were higher fol lowing prior presentations of their late derived non-words than follow ing prior presentations of their early derived non-words.