ABSTRACT
When an individual makes a commitment to participate in a psychological experiment, he or she begins an episode that involves coming at a particular time to a particular place, meeting a stranger and, on the basis of instructions from that stranger, engaging in some sort of mental activity. This episode is compacted in time and it can vary in importance to the individual. Although it is a rare experience for most, participating in an experiment represents another episode that is squeezed in between other experiences, for example breakfast routine, an hour of reading, discussing a pending exam with another student, and so forth (Tulving, 1983). If the experiment is a memory experiment, the subject is frequently confronted with familiar words that must be learned or encoded, followed by testing or retrieval. As with other more routine episodes, the participant brings a wealth of prior knowledge to the situation. The purpose of this chapter is to describe the influence of one aspect of that prior knowledge on memory performance: word knowledge.
