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Structure in Semantic Memory: A Probabilistic Approach using a Continuous Response Task

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Roger E. Millsap  and
William Meredith
Roger E. Millsap*
Affiliation:
Baruch College, City University of New York
William Meredith
Affiliation:
University of California-Berkeley
*
Requests for reprints should be sent to Roger E. Millsap, Department of Psychology, Baruch College, CUNY, 17 Lexington Avenue, New.York, NY 10010.
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Abstract

In the continuous response (CR) task, the subject is given the name of a familiar category and must respond with category examples within a fixed time limit. The response sequence and the interresponse times are the measured variables. A general model is proposed for performance in the CR task. The time taken to generate a response is identified with the shortest search time from among a set of simultaneous search processes. Each response has a generation probability that is a function of the parameters governing the search process durations. Data involving the category “states in the United States” are used to test the model. The model accounts for the performance of nearly all individuals in these data.

Keywords

semantic memorycontinuous response taskstochastic processexponential density
Type
Original Paper
Information
Psychometrika , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , March 1987 , pp. 19 - 41
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 The Psychometric Society

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Footnotes

This article is based on a dissertation completed at the University of California-Berkeley in partial fullfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree in psychology. Portions of the article were presented at the joint meeting of the Psychometric and Classification Societies (June 1984) and at the meeting of the Society for Mathematical Psychology (August 1984). The authors wish to thank Barbara Mellers, Juliet Schaffer, Steve Palmer, and Eleanor Rosch for helpful comments.

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