Perceiving semantic attributes

A large collection of semantic attributes has been posited in theories of episodic representation (e.g., categorization, concreteness, familiarity, meaningfulness, symbolic size, valence). The strengths of those attributes have been normed for thousands of items, and the attributes have played prominent roles in studies of how meaning affects episodic memory. Despite their centrality, our understanding of how semantic attributes are processed as items are encoded is quite limited. In the present experiments, we investigated a pair of basic questions about attribute processing: How is processing difficulty affected by attribute strength, and does attribute processing involve categorical distinctions ("strong," "weak")? The first question was investigated in Experiments 1 and 2 with marker attributes from the age, emotion, and size axes of the Big Three. We pitted four theoretical models of processing difficulty (ambiguity, linear, psychophysical, reverse psychophysical) against each other, using judgment latency and variability as difficulty indexes. Attributes from the age and size axes conformed to the ambiguity model, whereas attributes from the emotion axis conformed to the linear and psychophysical models. The question of categorical processing was investigated in Experiment 3, for marker attributes from the Big Three axes. There was no compelling evidence that attribute strength was processed categorically; instead, processing varied continuously as a function of attribute strength. The main conclusions were that although processing difficulty is a continuous function of attribute strength, the underlying strength/difficulty relation is fundamentally different for emotional attributes versus age and size attributes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).