Paradigmatic formation through context-mediation

Abstract

Words that regularly fill the same sentential slots are said to be paradigmatically related. Paradigmatic relations may be retained through a direct association or a latent representation at encoding, or by reinstating context during retrieval. We paired proper names by embedding them into two instances of the same sentence frame, each in a separate list, yielding blocks of two study-cloze sessions. The pairing between proper names was fixed across twelve blocks. In the static condition, the same sentence frames were used across blocks, while in the dynamic condition sentence frames changed for each block. Interference should accrue in both conditions if paradigmatic relations are based on a direct association or overlap in a latent representation, however, if paradigmatic relations are mediated by retrieved context then changing the sentence frame should release interference. Our results are consistent with a context-mediation account of paradigmatic relations.