Repeating phrases across unrelated narratives: Evidence of text repetition effects

Research has shown that text repetition effects are limited to conditions in which the context remains consistent across the two processing episodes, particularly when readers are focused on comprehension. Despite this, we found evidence of transfer effects across unrelated narratives. In a repeated condition, an ambiguous phrase appeared in two consecutive stories. In Story A, the phrase was presented in a sarcasm-biasing context, and in Story B, the phrase was presented in a neutral context. The pattern of findings from an offline measure (Experiment 1) and a reading time measure (Experiments 2, 3, and 4) indicated that participants were more likely to interpret the phrase in Story B as sarcastic in the repeated version than in a nonrepeated version, in which the phrase was absent from Story A. We conclude that during the reading of Story B, the phrase was reactivated from memory, even though the two stories were unrelated.     

Repeated text in unrelated passages: Repetition versus meaning selection effects

Despite previous findings, Klin, Ralano, and Weingartner (2007) found transfer benefits across unrelated passages. After processing an ambiguous phrase in Story A that was biased toward its sarcastic meaning, readers were more likely to interpret the identical phrase in Story B as sarcastic, even though it contained no disambiguating information. In the present experiments, we found both repetition effects (a benefit for the lexical items) and meaning selection effects (a benefit for the selected meaning of the phrase) with short delays between Stories A and B; with longer delays, only repetition effects were found. Whereas decreasing the elaboration of the phrase eliminated both effects, moving the disambiguating context from before to after the phrase eliminated meaning selection effects only. We conclude that meaning selection effects, which are based on conceptual overlap, are more sensitive to context changes and less robust than repetition effects, which are based on both perceptual and conceptual overlap.     

Women and Natural Hierarchy in Aristotle

In this paper, I examine the frame of reference in Aristotle's Politics within which he makes claims about women and their place in his conception of politics.