The role of test procedure in linguistic integration studies

The effects of type of recognition test procedure were studied in a Bransford and Franks (1971) integration paradigm. Subjects received a two-alternative forced-choice recognition test or a modified “forced-choice” test in which all the sentences for each idea set were presented at once and the “old” sentences had to be identified. Contrary to the usual Bransford and Franks results, in which a yes-no, one-sentence-at-a-time recognition procedure is employed, the ability to discriminate “old” sentences from “new” sentences was clearly observed. A bias for selecting more complex sentences, however, was found for the modified “forced-choice” procedure. A prototype learning model is described to account for these results and previous data.