Subjects were given a set of words and asked to produce a synonym for each.
One week later the same subjects were given a passage containing unhighlighted target words, and asked to read the text and then answer questions on it. Half of the target words were common to both training stages.
At test presented words fell into four categories - synonym, passage, both or new
Each set of test items contained equal numbers of high and low frequency words.
The subjects were grouped into three test conditions. Group A was asked to give a general familiarity rating for the words (a generalized matching condition). Group B was asked to recognise which words had been in the synonym generation task (an episodic matching condition). Group C was asked to recognise which words had been in the passage reading task (also an episodic matching condition).
