Two experiments are reported in which it is shown that (1) if subjects are presented with sentences containing general verbs, more specific verbs may be better recall cues for those sentences than the general verbs themselves, (2) in a recognition test using the same sort of materials subjects recognize the sentence that actually occurred, not a version with a more specific verb substituted. These results show that people instantiate when they encode verbs, but they rule out a simple recoding explanation of instantiation. Two alternative theoretical analyses of instantiation are presented and discussed.
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