INFORMATION RETRIEVAL FROM LONG-TERM MEMORY - CATEGORY SIZE AND RECOGNITION TIME

The Ss were shown single common English words and identified them as belonging or not belonging to well-known verbal categories. Each target word was identified with respect to two categories, one of which included the other by definition and was, therefore, necessarily the larger of the two. Two experiments using a variety of different nested verbal categories and two somewhat different methods produced similar results: the average time required for category recognition was greater for larger than for smaller categories. © 1968 Academic Press Inc.