Abstract
The current study examined whether thematic relations of the novel words could be acquired via descriptive episodes, and if yes, whether it could be generalized to thematically related words in a different scenario. In Experiment 1, a lexical decision task was used where the novel words served as primes for target words in four conditions: (1) corresponding concepts of the novel words, (2) thematically related words in the same episodes as that in learning condition, (3) thematically related words in different episodes, or (4) unrelated words served as targets. Event related potentials elicited by the targets revealed that compared to the unrelated words, the corresponding concepts and thematically related words in the same episodes elicited smaller N400s with a frontal-central distribution, whereas the thematically related words in different episodes elicited an enhanced late positive component. Experiment 2 further showed a priming effect of the corresponding concepts on the thematically related words in the same episodes as well as in a different episode, indicating that the absence of a priming effect of the learned novel words on the thematically related words in different episode could not be attributed to inappropriate selection of thematically related words in the two conditions. These results indicate that only the corresponding concepts and the thematically related words in the learning episodes were successfully primed, whereas the thematic association between the novel words and the thematically related words in different scenarios could only be recognized in a late processing stage. Our findings suggest that thematic knowledge of novel words is organized via separate scenarios, which are represented in a clustered manner in the semantic network.
Highlights
IntroductionOne way of conceptual organization is through thematic relations, that is their participation in the same scenario or event (e.g., car and garage, Mirman and Graziano, 2011, 2012), instead of perceptual features
One way of conceptual organization is through thematic relations, that is their participation in the same scenario or event, instead of perceptual features
When the novel words were presented for the first time, the participants tried to keep the novel words in their working memory retrieve episodic information from long term memory to infer the meaning of the novel words
Summary
One way of conceptual organization is through thematic relations, that is their participation in the same scenario or event (e.g., car and garage, Mirman and Graziano, 2011, 2012), instead of perceptual features. Concepts sharing a thematic relation perform complementary roles in the same event (Estes et al, 2011). Thematic relation refers to the complementary roles of concepts in the same events. Thematic relations have been found to be an important way to organize conceptual knowledge (Sachs et al, 2008a,b; Estes et al, 2011; Schwartz et al, 2011), and recognized as a critical part of language comprehension (Gagné and Shoben, 1997; Hare et al, 2009; Matsuki et al, 2011; Isberner and Richter, 2013).
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