Number-of-features effects and semantic processing

Participants list many semantic features for some concrete nouns (e.g., lion) and fewer for others (e.g., lime; McRae, de Sa, & Seidenberg, 1997). Pexman, Lupker, and Hino (2002) reported faster lexical decision and naming responses for high number of features (NOF) words than for low-NOF words. In the present research, we investigated the impact of NOF on semantic processing. We observed NOF effects in a self-paced reading task when prior context was not congruent with the target word (Experiment 1) and in a semantic categorization task (concrete vs. abstract; Experiment 2A). When we narrowed our stimuli to include high- and low-NOF words from a single category (birds), we found substantial NOF effects that were modulated by the specificity of the categorization task (Experiments 3A, 3B, and 3C). We argue that these results provide support for distributed representation of word meaning.