Adaptation to Level of Difficulty in Judging the Familiarity of Words

S ummary . The effect of context‐difficulty on judging the degree of familiarity of obscure words was investigated. Three experiments are described in which the subjects were, respectively, students from two different universities and naval ratings. All three groups displayed unwitting adaptation to the level of difficulty of the context in which the words were presented. Thus subjects, who were required to judge the familiarity of forty selected obscure words presented together with forty relatively easy words tended to judge the obscure words as unfamiliar; whereas those subjects (equated on vocabulary strength) who were presented with the selected words, together with forty extremely difficult words, tended to judge the selected words as familiar—the set of selected obscure words in the two cases being, in fact, identical. (Different sets of words were used, of course, for the students and for the naval ratings.) In addition, certain general differences emerged between the attitude of university students to little‐known words, and the attitude of naval ratings. The former were most influenced by context in their judgments of extreme unfamiliarity whilst for the latter, the context exerted a stronger effect on their judgments of complete familiarity

Adaptation (eye) · Cognitive psychology · Context (archaeology) · Linguistics · Set (abstract data type) · Vocabulary · Computer Science · Education and Critical Thinking Development · Educational Strategies and Epistemologies · History · Psychology · Social Psychology