Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

Number-of-features effects and semantic processing.

Penny M Pexman1, Gregory G Holyk, Marie-H Monfils

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. pexman@ucalgary.ca

Memory & Cognition
|December 4, 2003
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

The Role of Hope in Recovery During Transdiagnostic Exposure-Based Therapy for Anxiety-, Obsessive-Compulsive and Trauma- and Stressor-Related Disorders.

Behavior therapy·2026
Same author

Clever vermin? Collective intelligence in rats and roaches.

Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences·2026
Same author

Who gets it? Explaining variability in children's written irony comprehension.

Journal of child language·2026
Same author

Distinguishing abstraction from abstractness: Specificity norms for 8,500 English words.

Behavior research methods·2026
Same author

Individual differences in mentalizing skills and their relationship to concept processing.

Acta psychologica·2026
Same author

CO<sub>2</sub> Reactivity but Not CO<sub>2</sub>-Induced Orexin/c-Fos Colocalization Differentially Predicts Alcohol-Seeking Behaviour After Extinction and Retrieval-Extinction in Rats.

Addiction biology·2026
Same journal

Limited protective effects of multilingualism against age-related cognitive decline.

Memory & cognition·2026
Same journal

Validation of illustrated texts: Can pictures raise awareness of inconsistencies?

Memory & cognition·2026
Same journal

4I remember (and forget) your happy smiling face: Directed forgetting of emotionally expressive faces of in-group and out-group members.

Memory & cognition·2026
Same journal

Identity in the spotlight: Matching faces without overlapping features.

Memory & cognition·2026
Same journal

Test delay and change awareness moderate retroactive and proactive memory effects.

Memory & cognition·2026
Same journal

The Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) illusion in short-term memory: Opposite effects of retention interval on true and false recognition.

Memory & cognition·2026
See all related articles

The number of semantic features (NOF) influences how words are processed. High NOF words show stronger effects in semantic tasks, supporting distributed word meaning representations.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Neuroscience

Background:

  • Previous research indicates concrete nouns have more semantic features than abstract ones.
  • Studies show a link between the number of features and word processing speed.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the impact of the number of semantic features (NOF) on semantic processing.
  • To determine if NOF effects are modulated by contextual congruence and task specificity.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized self-paced reading tasks with varying contextual congruence.
  • Employed semantic categorization tasks (concrete vs. abstract).
  • Analyzed high- and low-NOF words within a specific category (birds) across multiple experiments.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • Number of features (NOF) effects were observed in tasks with non-congruent context and semantic categorization.
  • NOF effects were substantial and modulated by task specificity when stimuli were limited to a single category.
  • Faster responses were noted for high NOF words in prior lexical decision tasks.

Conclusions:

  • The number of semantic features significantly impacts semantic processing.
  • Findings support a distributed representation model of word meaning.
  • Context and task demands interact with feature information during word comprehension.