A TRANSFER-APPROPRIATE PROCESSING ACCOUNT OF CONTEXT EFFECTS IN WORD-FRAGMENT COMPLETION

The claim that priming on implicit memory tasks such as word-fragment completion is sensitive to context effects was tested by using homogra phs (e.g., board) to manipulate context. On the basis of previous find ings, it was assumed that presentation of only the perceptual cue at t est (_oa_d) should activate the dominant meaning, thereby creating the same context for homographs encoded for their dominant encoding and a different context for homographs encoded for their nondominant meanin g. As expected, little or no effect of varying context was observed on a perceptual implicit task (Experiments 1-2B). When explicit retrieva l instructions were given in Experiment 3, same-context encoding led t o greater recall of homographs from word-fragment cues relative to dif ferent-context encoding. These results are consistent with the predict ions of the transfer-appropriate-processing view because little advant age for the same-context condition was obtained in implicit tests in t he absence of conceptual cues.