Cue depreciation: When word fragment completion is undermined by prior exposure to lesser fragments.

Studied impairment in ability to think of a previously studied item resulting from a change in extra-item context from study to test in 5 experiments, using a total of 156 Ss (primarily university students). The following results were obtained: a fragment (e.g, r-i--rop) of a just-studied word (raindrop) was shown to be less readily completed if it was presented bit by bit (r------p, r----r-p, r-i--r-p, r-i--rop) rather than all at once (Exps I, III, IV, and V). No such effect was found if the word had not been studied beforehand (Exps II–V). This pattern of results occurred even when fragments of studied and nonstudied words occurred in the same test and under conditions in which Ss could not tell whether a given fragment was of a studied or nonstudied word (Exps IV and V). In addition, for words that had been studied beforehand, the impairment was shown to increase systematically with the number of steps involved in the presentation of the word fragment (Exp III) and also to persist when the time allowed for completion of the final version of the fragment was increased from 4 sec to a full minute (Exp V). The target words are appended. (10 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)