The Evolution

The Evolution
34

Such facilitative effects appear to have been observed for lexical
decisions (Meyer & Schvaneveldt₅ 1971; Meyer, Schvaneveldt, & Ruddy, 1975;
Schvaneveldt & Meyer, 1973), lexical decisions primed by ambiguities

I (Holley-Wilcox & Blank, 1980; Onifer & Swinney, 1981; Simpson, 1981),
naming (Brown & Block, 1980; Warren, 1977), the tachistoscopic identifi-
cation of words (Tulving & Gold, 1963), intersection (Loftus, 1973; Loftus
& Loftus, 1974), and interference in a Stroop (1938) task (Warren, 1972,
1974). There is also an apparent facilitative effect at work that causes
perceptual slips (see the examples of Celce-Murcia₅ 1980 ; Games & Bond₅
1980).

To take just one of the above paradigms, consider the general issue
of lexical decisions. According to both residual and spreading activa-
tion theories, making a lexical decision on a letter string such as
NURSE (i.e. judging whether NURSE is a word) should facilitate making a
subsequent decision on DOCTOR, inasmuch as the word nurse should give
rise to a secondary activation of the word doctor, which should facilitate
its retrieval. This effect has been clearly observed in the studies men-
tioned above.

Accordingly, in what follows it will be assumed that secondary acti-
vations of some kind occur, and attention will instead be focused on
evaluating how they occur. In particular, attention will be paid to the
issue of whether there really are two types of links, one of which resid-
uallly activates and one of which does not, as this is a key point on which
spreading activation theory and residual activation theory differ.

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