Semantic influences on morphological facilitation

Abstract

Two semantic variables, concreteness and morphological family size, were examined in a single word and a primed lexical decision task. Single word recognition latencies were faster for concrete relative to abstract targets only when morphological family size was small. The magnitude of morphological facilitation for primes related by inflection was greater than by derivation although both revealed a very similar interaction of concreteness and family size. In summary, concreteness influenced morphological processing so as to produce slower decision latencies for small family abstract than concrete words both in a single word and in a morphologically primed context. However, magnitudes of facilitation in isolation from baselines provided an incomplete account of morphological processing.

Monolingual and bilingual recognition of regular and irregular English verbs: Sensitivity to form similarity varies with first language experience

“…This outcome is consistent with the claim that greater semantic richness enhances the efficiency with which words are processed. However, because the magnitudes of facilitation for both the high and low resonace verbs did not differ, it suggests that semantic richness influences unprimed recognition latencies but that alone it cannot provide an adequate account of morphological facilitation (see Feldman, Basnight-Brown, & Pastizzo, 2006). The present demonstration of baseline differences due to semantic richness of the target points to a potential problem interpreting magnitudes of facilitation without considering baselines in designs where targets as well as the relation between prime and target differ.…”

Constituent integration during the processing of compound words: Does it involve the use of relational structures?

“…LSA scores have been used successful in a variety of situations including the simulation of semantic priming results (Landauer & Dumais, 1997) and semantic similarity effects in episodic memory (Howard & Kahana, 2002;Steyvers, Shiffrin, & Nelson, 2004). In terms of compound words, LSA has been used to match the overall similarity of their primes and targets (Feldman, Basnight-Brown, & Pastizzo, 2006) and assess the semantic similarity among compound words (del Prado Martin et al, 2005). The relation priming observed in Experiments 1-3 cannot be attributed to differential similarity/association between the prime and target compounds in the sameand different-relation conditions because the association between the prime and target items in our studies did not differ across these conditions.…”

Semantic transparency is not invisibility: A computational model of perceptually-grounded conceptual combination in word processing

“…This analysis therefore concerns effects within the set of compounds for which visual composition values can be derived. An additional analysis demonstrating that there are also systematic processing differences between these compounds and non-visually-represented ones -in line with a general concreteness/imageability effect in compounds (Feldman, Basnight-Brown, & Pastizzo, 2006;Schmidtke & Kuperman, 2019;see Paivio, 1966see Paivio, , 1986) -is provided in Supplementary Material A. The testing procedure is displayed in Figure 4.…”