How does the creation of new semantic relationships during dialogue impact long-term semantic representations after...

Dialogue is an ideal setting for changing linguistic representations thanks to the repeated use of new words and meanings. Two experiments were conducted to examine the extent to which new semantic relationships created during dialogue may change preexisting representations in long-term semantic memory after a dialogue. For this purpose, we developed an interactive agreement referential task to create new semantic relationships in dialogue between two words by associating them to a single picture. One day after the dialogue phase, participants performed either a lexical decision task associated to a semantic priming paradigm (Experiment 1), or a semantic relatedness judgment task (Experiment 2). In both tasks, the participants' performance was collected during the processing of pairs of words referring either to the same picture or to different pictures during the dialogue phase in order to assess changes in long-term semantic representations after the dialogue phase. No significant effect of relatedness due to the creation of new semantic relationships during dialogue was found in the lexical decision task. However, when the participants' attention was focused on semantic relationships during the semantic relatedness judgment task, which required participants to perform an explicit judgment, newly related words were rated as more related semantically. The two experiments bear important implications for understanding on the links between dialogue and the updating of long-term semantic representations.