Semantic activation, letter search and N400: A reply to Mari-Beffa, Valdes, Cullen, Catena and Houghton (2005)

Dombrowski, Jan-Henryk; Heil, Martin

doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2005.12.082

Cited by 14 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Although these assumptions are too complicated to delineate here, if McNamara's line of reasoning is correct, the robust wordfrequency effects we obtained fail to support this prediction from the Stolz and Besner model. 7 According to Heil (personal communication, May 2007), the German targets in Heil et al (2004) and Dombrowski and Heil (2006) spanned a broad frequency range, but overall their frequencies were relatively low and more so in Dombrowski and Heil. Because LS priming was not analyzed as a function of the target's word frequency, it is unclear whether their lowest frequency targets did show LS priming, as was found in the present study.…”

Section: Theoretical Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Nevertheless, Heil et al found evidence of semantic priming in the N400 ERP that was measured during target processing. (Dombrowski & Heil, 2006, also reported an N400 semantic priming effect for the subset of their participants whose lexical decision RTs/errors failed to show semantic priming from LS primes when a repetition priming condition was not included.) However, Besner, Stolz, and Holcomb (2005) argued that Heil et al's N400 ERP results do not necessarily provide evidence that semantic activation occurred during LS on the prime.…”

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confidence: 93%

“…Table 1 lists in chronological order the procedures and data from all of the LS semantic priming studies of which we are aware that have used the lexical decision task. 3 As shown in Table 1, some of the statistically null priming effects from LS primes were numerically substantial, sometimes for RTs (e.g., Henik et al, 1994;Raveh, 2000;Stolz & Besner, 1998) and sometimes for errors (e.g., Dombrowski & Heil, 2006;Kaye & Brown, 1985;, with some individual effects even achieving statistical significance (for RTs, Kaye & Brown, 1985; for errors, Brown, Roberts, & Besner, 2001;Chiappe, Smith, & Besner, 1996;Henik et al, 1994;Hoffman & McMillan, 1985;Pastizzo, Neely, & Tse, 2007). A t test on the tabled mean priming effects treating each mean as a "participant" showed that both the overall mean priming for RTs and for errors were significantly different from zero (see Table 1 for statistics).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Semantic priming from letter-searched primes occurs for low- but not high-frequency targets: Automatic semantic access may not be a myth.

Tse

Neely²

2007

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Letter-search (LS) within a prime often eliminates semantic priming. In 2 lexical decision experiments, the authors found that priming from LS primes occurred for low-frequency (LF) but not high-frequency (HF) targets whether the target's word frequency was manipulated between or within participants and whether the prime-target pairs were associated symmetrically or forward asymmetrically. For the LF targets, LS priming was (a) equivalent for forward asymmetric and symmetric pairs and (b) equal to silent-read (SR) priming for forward asymmetric pairs but less than SR priming for symmetric pairs. The typical finding of greater SR priming for response times for LF than for HF targets occurred for symmetric priming but not for forward asymmetric priming, which showed the interaction for errors. The authors consider their findings' implications for various accounts of how LS affects priming and explain the findings within J. H. Neely and D. E. Keefe's (1989) 3-process model as follows: (a) LS eliminates expectancy and semantic matching but does not reduce semantic activation and (b) expectancy contributes to SR priming for HF targets but not for LF targets, whereas the opposite is so for semantic matching.

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Section: Theoretical Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 93%

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confidence: 99%

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Semantic priming from letter-searched primes occurs for low- but not high-frequency targets: Automatic semantic access may not be a myth.

Tse

Neely²

2007

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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“…However, results on the automaticity of semantic processing of written words have not been entirely consistent. In most studies in which subjects were asked to judge whether a target letter was present in the prime word and to make a lexical decision of the target word, the N400 effect was found (Dombrowski & Heil, 2006;Heil, Rolke, & Pecchinenda, 2004;cf. Marí-Beffa, Valdés, Cullen, Catena, & Houghton, 2005).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Word Semantics Is Processed Even without Attentional Effort

Relander

Rama

Kujala

2009

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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We examined the attentional modulation of semantic priming and the N400 effect for spoken words. The aim was to find out how the semantics of spoken language is processed when attention is directed to another modality (passive task), to the phonetics of spoken words (phonological task), or to the semantics of spoken words (word task). Equally strong behavioral priming effects were obtained in the phonological and the word tasks. A significant N400 effect was found in all tasks. The effect was stronger in the word and the phonological tasks than in the passive task, but there was no difference in the magnitude of the effect between the phonological and the word tasks. The latency of the N400 effect did not differ between the tasks. Although the N400 effect had a centroparietal maximum in the phonological and the word tasks, it was largest at the parietal recording sites in the passive task. The effect was more pronounced at the left than right recording sites in the phonological task, but there was no laterality effect in the other tasks. The N400 effect in the passive task indicates that semantic priming occurs even when spoken words are not actively attended. However, stronger N400 effect in the phonological and the word tasks than in the passive task suggests that controlled processes modulate the N400 effect. The finding that there were no differences in the N400 effect between the phonological and the word tasks indicates that the semantics of attended spoken words is processed regardless of whether semantic processing is relevant for task performance.

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“…The single-letter Stroop effect mirrors the prime task effect (for a review, see Maxfield, 1997), which refers to the elimination of semantic priming (i.e., faster and more accurate processing of a probe word that is preceded by a semantically related prime word) when a letter search has to be performed on the prime. However, the prime task effect does not result from curtailed semantic activation as both alternative behavioral measures (Hutchison & Bosco, 2007;Küper & Heil, 2008;Tse & Neely, 2007) and event-related potential (ERP) indices (Dombrowski & Heil, 2006;Heil, Rolke, & Pecchinenda, 2004;Küper & Heil, 2009Mari-Beffa, Valdes, Cullen, Catena, & Houghton, 2005) have revealed semantic priming effects where lexical decision times did not.…”

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Attentional Focus Manipulations Affect Naming Latencies of Neutral But Not of Incongruent Stroop Trials

Küper

Heil

2012

Swiss Journal of Psychology

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People are slower and more error-prone when indicating the color of incongruent color words compared to that of neutral stimuli. This Stroop effect results from the concurrent semantic analysis of the word stimulus. It has long been considered a prime example of the automaticity of semantic activation. However, coloring as well as cuing only a single letter both reduce the Stroop effect to the point of being absent. Proposed underlying mechanisms include the blocking of semantic activation, an improved selectivity between the interfering stimulus dimensions, and slowed color processing. In order to test the validity of these differing accounts of the single-letter Stroop effect, we compared vocal responses to standard and single-letter Stroop stimuli in two experiments. Irrespective of whether participants maintained a wide (Experiment 1) or a narrow (Experiment 2) attentional focus, both single-letter coloring and single-letter cuing increased reaction times to neutral Stroop stimuli but left those to incongruent stimuli unaffected. Both curtailed semantic activation and improved selection for action should, however, speed up reactions to incongruent stimuli. Our data thus support an explanation of the single-letter Stroop phenomenon in terms of impeded color processing, possibly as a result of color-color interference.

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Semantic activation, letter search and N400: A reply to Mari-Beffa, Valdes, Cullen, Catena and Houghton (2005)

Cited by 14 publications

References 12 publications

Semantic priming from letter-searched primes occurs for low- but not high-frequency targets: Automatic semantic access may not be a myth.

Semantic priming from letter-searched primes occurs for low- but not high-frequency targets: Automatic semantic access may not be a myth.

Word Semantics Is Processed Even without Attentional Effort

Attentional Focus Manipulations Affect Naming Latencies of Neutral But Not of Incongruent Stroop Trials

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