Abstract
Zusammenfassung: Diese Studie beschäftigt sich mit der Verarbeitung von Personbeschreibungen. In zwei Experimenten wurde der Einfluss der syntaktischen Kohärenz und der Kategorisierbarkeit der Information auf das Persongedächtnis und die soziale Urteilsbildung untersucht. Probanden erhielten Personbeschreibungen, die aus Aussagen bestanden, die sich jeweils auf ein Personattribut bezogen. Diese Aussagen waren entweder durch Präpositionen miteinander hochgradig verbunden oder völlig unverbunden. Zusätzlich variierten die Texte nach dem Grad ihrer Kategorisierbarkeit, indem ein Text ein Stereotyp aktivierte und der andere individuelle Merkmale enthielt. In Experiment I hatten Probanden den Text zu reproduzieren und in Experiment II war der Text mit eigenen Worten wiederzugeben. Es zeigte sich, dass die Reproduktionsleistung im Falle individueller Merkmalsinformation durch Einführung von Präpositionen zur Merkmalsverknüpfung signifikant gesteigert wurde und dabei komplexere personbezogene Inferenzen auftraten als bei Vorlage von unverbundenen Attributen. Die Ergebnisse werden diskutiert auf der Grundlage eines assoziativen Netzwerkansatzes zum Persongedächtnis. Es wird argumentiert, dass dieser Ansatz erweitert werden muss, um spezielle logische Relationen zwischen Personattributen angemessen modellieren zu können.
Summary: This paper concerns the comprehension of person descriptions. In two experiments we investigated the influence of syntactical coherence and ease of categorization of the information on person memory and judgments. Ss listened to person descriptions which contained phrases concerning single person attributes. These phrases were either highly connected by prepositions or totally unconnected. In addition, the texts differed in their degree of categorizability, one activating a social stereotype and the other containing individual attributes. In Experiment I the Ss had to reproduce the text and in Experiment II the task was to summarize the information. In Experiment I the reproduction rates increased significantly with the connectedness in the case of non-stereotypical information. In Experiment II, we found more complex inference patterns under the same condition. The results are discussed within the associative network approach to person memory. It is argued that this approach has to be further differentiated with regard to particular logical relations between person attributes.
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