398 MILDRED WEST LORING 



growing conviction that it is necessary to distinguish between 

 the reading and the conversational vocabulary. In making the 

 original lists the experimenter had unwittingly but naturally 

 chosen words which are familiar as read. Many of these were 

 pronounced unfamiliar when heard by the subject, though his 

 judgment changed when the word was spelled for him. 



2. Words difficult to pronounce intelligibly to the subject, 

 such as leak, which was taken variously as leap, link, etc. 



3. Words having an emotional value either obviously or 

 subtly; in the first case words like pregnant, corset, etc., and in 

 the latter case that rather large group of words almost entirely 

 confined to the masculine vocabulary whose dictionary meaning 

 is perfectly unemotional, but in everyday use have also a subtle 

 sexual meaning. The elimination of these words was made by 

 several men in the department. Since however, many of these 

 words seem to be purely colloquial, there are doubtless many 

 still in the revised lists. 



4. Homonyms in the narrow sense. A difference of spelling 

 and identity of pronunciation in words of the same part of speech 

 was made the criterion. Fate and fete are homonyms for this 

 experiment, but not great and grate. It was considered sufficient 

 control that the subject knew what part of speech he was being 

 given. Furthermore most homonyms actually do exist in the 

 narrow sense taken. Two of these homonyms escaped detection 

 and got into the revised lists. These are chaste, chased, and 

 dessert, desert/ 



5. Words that are intrinsically difficult to respond to with 

 the required type of response, such as the nouns nothing and 

 ounce. Adjectives are not commonly used with these nouns. 



6. A small group of words eliminated for various unclassi- 

 fied reasons, long reaction times or absurd responses attributable 

 to none of the above reasons. 



After these rejections were completed, special lists were made 

 up from the selected words for ten days' work. Each list con- 

 tained 30 words and six lists were given in an hour making 180 

 words per session. Whereas the two types of stimulus words 

 were run through serially in experiment I, in this experiment one, 



