Abstract
In the present experiment an attempt was made to reduce interference due to stimulus semantic similarity in paired associate learning. Eighteen adjectives were used as the stimuli. One half of the stimuli in the list were semantically highly similar with each other (HS), and the other half were of low similarity (LS). Either a differentiating cue noun, that would facilitate semantically selective encoding, or an unrelated noun was presented with each adjective. Facilitation was found only when the differentiating cue nouns were presented with the adjectives, while the unrelated nouns disturbed learning. These results were interpreted as an evidence that interference due to stimulus semantic similarity is caused by difficulty in differentiated selective encoding of semantic components.
