PEOPLE, WORDS, AND PERCEPTIONS - A PHENOMENOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION OF TEXTUALITY

Two experiments investigated how textual factors influence the percept ion of bibliographical records. Subjects in the first experiment brows ed indexes for the subject descriptor associated with the displayed re cord. Results showed that topical and broader descriptors are matched to records more easily than narrower descriptors. In the second experi ment, subjects ranked the relevance of descriptors for a bibliographic record. The interaction of three textual factors are reported: (a) se mantic distance; (b) direction up or down a generic tree of descriptor s; and (c) term overlap. Both experiments found that relevance percept ions degraded systematically with semantic distance, but the rate of d egradation was different for top and bottom records. Term overlap modi fied these effects.