People, words, and perceptions: A phenomenological investigation of textuality

Two experiments investigated how textual factors influence the perception of bibliographical records. Subjects in the first experiment browsed indexes for the subject descriptor associated with the displayed record. Results showed that topical and broader descriptors are matched to records more easily than narrower descriptors. In the second experiment, subjects ranked the relevance of descriptors for a bibliographic record. The interaction of three textual factors are reported: (a) semantic distance; (b) direction up or down a generic tree of descriptors; and (c) term overlap. Both experiments found that relevance perceptions degraded systematically with semantic distance, but the rate of degradation was different for top and bottom records. Term overlap modified these effects.