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dc.contributor.authorDraine, Sean Cen_US
dc.date.accessioned2009-10-06T23:06:21Z
dc.date.available2009-10-06T23:06:21Z
dc.date.issued1997en_US
dc.identifier.otherb40683679en_US
dc.identifier.other39073407en_US
dc.identifier.otherThesis 45768en_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1773/9143
dc.descriptionThesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1997en_US
dc.description.abstractCognitive theorists have traditionally assumed that, due to analytic limitations, unconscious cognitive systems play only a minor role in language comprehension relative to conscious systems. The following research sought to determine whether the analytic powers of unconscious cognition include the ability to parse multimorphemic words and simple syntactic constructions. Four experiments used variations of a two-choice, subliminal priming paradigm (Greenwald, Draine, & Abrams, 1996) to assess unconscious processing of (1) grammatically uncombinable word pairs, (2) two-word grammatical negations, (3) one-word lexical negations, and (4) compound words and noun phrases. Results of Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated unconscious sensitivity to the meanings of the separate constituents of word pairs, but not to phrase-level meanings. Results of Experiment 3 showed weak evidence for unconscious processing of lexical negation. In Experiment 4, although priming effects were obtained for supraliminal noun phrases and compound words, subliminal conditions showed no evidence for unconscious processing of the primes. The findings indicate that unconscious linguistic analysis is limited to activation of stored semantic representations of single, morphologically simple words. Semantic representations of phrases and morphologically complex words, in contrast, must be constructed and processed by conscious cognitive systems.en_US
dc.format.extentix, 68 p.en_US
dc.language.isoen_USen_US
dc.rightsCopyright is held by the individual authors.en_US
dc.rights.uriFor information on access and permissions, please see http://digital.lib.washington.edu/rw-faq/rights.htmlen_US
dc.subject.otherTheses--Psychologyen_US
dc.titleAnalytic limitations of unconscious language processingen_US
dc.typeThesisen_US
dc.embargo.termsManuscript available on the University of Washington campuses and via UW NetID. Full text may be available via ProQuest's Dissertations and Theses Full Text database or through your local library's interlibrary loan service.


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