The teaching of rhetoric in French Jesuit colleges, 1556–1762 1

This study examined the effects of sentence context on response variation for vague, ambiguous, and clear nouns. Thirty‐four subjects within a 2x3 mixed design responded to five nouns of each type. The results indicated that nouns appearing in sentence context produced less response variation than nouns appearing alone. It was also found that clear nouns generated more homogeneous responses than did vague or ambiguous nouns. Finally, the study showed that ambiguous nouns appearing in sentences did not result in more or less response variation than did vague nouns appearing in sentences.