Holmes, V. M., & Rundle, M. (1985). The role of prior context in the comprehension of abstract and concrete sentences. Psychological Research, 47(3), 159-171.

Holmes, V.;Rundle, M.

1985

Holmes, V. M., & Rundle, M. (1985). The role of prior context in the comprehension of abstract and concrete sentences. Psychological Research, 47(3), 159-171.

1-feb

Conducted 2 experiments with 100 undergraduates to test the hypothesis that abstract sentences become as easy to understand as concrete sentences when given appropriate prior context. Both experiments used a similar procedure to compare the comprehension of abstract and concrete sentences in isolation and in context except that in Exp II, the contexts were modified to make abstract and concrete contexts more comparable. Paragraph contexts and sentences followed by a comprehension question were presented in a speeded reading task. Results show that the abstract sentences remained significantly more difficult to process than the concrete sentences in both experiments, thus refuting the hypothesis that the concreteness effect is a function of differential context availability. It is proposed that lexical differences and/or differences in ease of propositional integration may underlie the effect.

Sentences were read significantly faster in context than in isolation. Abstract sentences took significantly longer to read on average than concrete sentences. The critical result was that the interaction of these two factors was far from significant. While there was a slight trend for context to facilitate the reading of abstract sentences, more than that of concrete sentences, the interaction was not significant. The results of both experiments reported here have shown that, while prior linguistic context does speed up comprehension of abstract sentences, comprehension of concrete sentences is facilitated to exactly the same extent.

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