Effects of semantic relatedness on same-different decisions in a good-bad categorization task.

Abstract

Schvaneveldt, Durso, and Mukherji (1982) investigated the effect of relatedness on six kinds of same-different categorization tasks. They discovered two distinct patterns of results. For tasks involving surface features of words, relatedness facilitated both same and different judgments equally, whereas for tasks requiring a semantic analysis, relatedness facilitated same judgments but had no effect on different judgments. The only task that did not conform to this division was judgment of good versus bad, which showed the same pattern as surface-featu re tasks. The present two experiments showed that this anomaly was due to the use of antonym word pairs for this task. When nonantonyms are used, there is no facilitation of different judgments by relatedness. The nature of antonymy as a semantic relation is discussed. In a recent article, Schvaneveldt, Durso, and Mukherji (1982) discovered two distinct classes of same-different categorization tasks. They were investigating the effects of semantic relatedness on same-different category judgments, using six different tasks that varied in the depth of processing required. The particular advance that they made over previous research on this question (Glass, Holyoak, & O'Dell, 1974; Schaeffer & Wallace, 1970) was in devising materials for which relatedness could be manipulated independently of whether a same or a different response had to be made. Thus, a lack of semantic relatedness between a pair of words could not be used as the basis for a different decision (as had been possible in earlier studies). They discovered that for judgments involving vowel-consonant (as initial letter of the word), word-nonword (where the nonword was a misspelled word), and good-bad decisions, a particular pattern of results could be obtained. For these three tasks, semantic relatedness facilitated both same and different responses equally. For judgments involving plant-animal, natural-manmade, or noun-verb, however, a different pattern was found. For these tasks, relatedness facilitated same decisions,