Dissociative contributions of semantic and lexical-phonological information to immediate recognition.

Abstract

Several neuropsychological studies have reported that patients with memory deficits exhibit a dissociation of effects attributed to semantic and lexical-phonological information in verbal working memory (e.g., Reilly, Martin, & Grossman, 2005; Romani & Martin, 1999). The present study reports on 3 experiments conducted with individuals without memory problems to examine the dissociation between the word imageability effect (WIE) and the word frequency effect (WFE). Experiment 1 used a modified semantic recognition task, in which participants were presented with 10-item lists and selected synonyms of list words from among 5 words. This task led to a significant WIE but no WFE. On the other hand, Experiment 2 used a modified recognition task in which targets were homophones, to promote the usage of phonological information while minimizing the potential impact of semantic information. There was no WIE but a significant WFE in Experiment 2. Experiment 3 replicated the results of Experiment 1 using 5-item lists and a 2-alternative forced choice procedure. Taken together, these results systematically replicate the double dissociation observed in neuropsychological studies. These findings suggest that semantic information can contribute to successful retrieval from verbal working memory without mediation from lexical-phonological information.

The role of semantic representations in verbal working memory.

“…Further studies have qualified this distinction by investigating the nature of the processes underlying WM maintenance as a function of either mechanism. Congruent with prior research on immediate recall from STM (Baddeley, 1966;Baddeley et al, 1975), Camos and colleagues (2011;2013;Mora & Camos, 2013) have shown that rehearsal strongly emphasizes the phonological characteristics of memoranda in complex span tasks.…”

“…Further studies with normal participants have also demonstrated similar double dissociations (Nishiyama, 2013(Nishiyama, , 2014. For example, using a dual-task interference paradigm, Nishiyama (2014) showed that disrupting maintenance of words using articulatory suppression or tapping differently affected performance on a homophone (phonological) or synonym (semantic) short-term recognition task.…”

“…Given this distinction between rehearsal and refreshing, Camos and colleagues (2011;2013;Mora & Camos, 2013) have further investigated whether the qualitative nature of WM recall also differs between rehearsal and refreshing. That is, the prediction that rehearsal is especially important for phonological representations in verbal WM (Baddeley, 1966) implies that its efficiency for WM maintenance is more susceptible to the phonological characteristics of the memoranda.…”

Separability of active semantic and phonological maintenance in verbal working memory

“…Words evoke semantic representations based on LTM (e.g., [ 4 ]). Current evidence suggests that such semantic representations can contribute to performance of short-term memory tasks separably from phonological representations (e.g., [ 5 , 6 – 10 ]). If so, are the semantic representations actively maintained independently from phonological maintenance?…”

Semantic similarity and associated abstractness norms for 630 French word pairs

“…The tangibility criterion is best represented by the concreteness variable defining the distinction between concrete and abstract concepts based on the dual coding and context availability theories. It plays a key role in psycholinguistic research, as well as providing an explanation for many phenomena, such as hemispheric lateralisation in the processing of concrete and abstract concepts (Oliveira, Perea, Ladera, & Gamito, 2013), or ease of retrieval of concrete words compared to abstract ones (Mate, Allen, & Baques, 2012;Nishiyama, 2013).…”