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Semantic Neighborhood Effects for Abstract versus Concrete Words
Ashley N Danguecan1, Lori Buchanan1
1Department of Psychology, University of Windsor, Windsor ON, Canada.
Frontiers in Psychology
|July 27, 2016
Summary
Semantic effects in visual word recognition are task-dependent. This study found semantic neighborhood density impacts abstract word processing more than concrete words across various tasks.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Psycholinguistics
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Semantic effects in visual word recognition are considered task-specific, indicating flexible and dynamic semantic representations.
- Understanding task variations is crucial for a comprehensive theory of semantic processing.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how semantic neighborhood density (SND) influences the processing of concrete versus abstract words.
- To compare word recognition across tasks with varying explicit semantic demands.
Main Methods:
- Utilized a factorial design manipulating concreteness and SND across four visual word recognition tasks: standard lexical decision, go/no-go lexical decision, progressive demasking, and sentence relatedness.
- Employed a consistent stimulus set of 44 concrete and 44 abstract words, each with low and high SND variants.
Main Results:
- A consistent pattern of response times (RTs) emerged across all tasks.
- Semantic neighborhood density effects were observed for abstract words, but not consistently for concrete words.
Conclusions:
- Findings underscore the importance of interactive effects in word recognition.
- Linguistic associative information, particularly related to SND, appears especially critical for processing abstract words.
Keywords:
abstract wordsconcrete wordslexical decisionprogressive demaskingsemantic neighborhood densityvisual word recognitionMore Related Videos
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