Transfer Appropriate Processing (TAP), The Semantic Differential and Meaning Priming

Abstract

The current study used the semantic differential as a guiding tool to investigate the transfer pattern between judgment tasks. Subjects judged the meaning of words on semantic scales such as pleasant/unpleasant and strong/weak. In accordance with TAP, transfer was task specific. Maximum transfer was found when the test task scale was the same as the acquisition task scale. When the task scales represented orthogonal semantic dimensions, no significant transfer was found. When the task scales differed but involved common semantic dimensions, transfer pattern could be either relatively symmetrical or not. With an instance approach, modeling of experimental data suggested that two important variables underlying the transfer pattern were distance/dissimilarity between scales and spread/variability of the scales. Transfer was inversely related to distance between scales; while the smaller the spread, the more likely for a scale to get transfer from others and less likely to prime other scales.