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Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects
Published on: November 30, 2018
Looking for meaning: eye movements are sensitive to overlapping semantic features, not association
Eiling Yee1, Eve Overton, Sharon L Thompson-Schill
1Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-6241, USA. eiling@psych.upenn.edu
None:
Theories of semantic memory differ in the extent to which relationships among concepts are captured via associative or via semantic relatedness. We examined the contributions of these two factors, using a visual world paradigm in which participants selected the named object from a four-picture display. We controlled for semantic relatedness while manipulating associative strength by using the visual world paradigm's analogue to presenting asymmetrically associated pairs in either their forward or backward associative direction (e.g., ham-eggs vs. eggs-ham). Semantically related objects were preferentially fixated regardless of the direction of presentation (and the effect size was unchanged by presentation direction). However, when pairs were associated but not semantically related (e.g., iceberg-lettuce), associated objects were not preferentially fixated in either direction. These findings lend support to theories in which semantic memory is organized according to semantic relatedness (e.g., distributed models) and suggest that association by itself has little effect on this organization.
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