Semantic Richness Effects in Syntactic Classification: The Role of Feedback.

Melvin J Yap,Penny M Pexman

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01394

Abstract

Words with richer semantic representations are recognized faster across a range of lexical processing tasks. The most influential account of this finding is based on the idea that semantic richness effects are mediated by feedback from semantic-level to lower-level representations. In an earlier lexical decision study, Yap et al. (2015) tested this claim by examining the joint effects of stimulus quality and four semantic richness dimensions (imageability, number of features, semantic neighborhood density, semantic diversity). The results of that study showed that joint effects of stimulus quality and richness were generally additive, consistent with the idea that semantic feedback does not typically reach the earliest levels of representation in lexical decision. The present study extends this earlier work by investigating the joint effects of stimulus quality and the same four semantic richness dimensions on syntactic classification performance (is this a noun or verb?), which places relatively more emphasis on semantic processing. Additive effects of stimulus quality and richness were found for two of the four targeted dimensions (concreteness, number of features) while semantic neighborhood density and semantic diversity did not seem to influence syntactic classification response times. These findings provide further support against the view that semantic information reaches early letter-level processes.

Highlights

In order to understand the mechanisms and processes that support reading, researchers have examined the effect of a myriad of word properties on lexical processing performance
Semantic neighborhood density had no effect on RT or accuracy rates, while the influence of semantic diversity was restricted to accuracy rates
To establish the robustness of the null findings in Experiment 2, we conducted supplementary analyses to examine the effects of concreteness, semantic neighborhood density, and semantic diversity, using newly available megastudy data from the Calgary semantic decision project (Pexman et al, 2016)

Summary

Introduction

In order to understand the mechanisms and processes that support reading, researchers have examined the effect of a myriad of word properties on lexical processing performance (see Yap and Balota, 2015, for a review). The ultimate goal of reading is comprehension, the visual word recognition literature has traditionally been dominated by studies that consider the influence of orthographic (e.g., bigram frequency, word length, frequency of occurrence, orthographic neighborhood density), phonological (e.g., regularity, consistency), and morphological (e.g., morphological family size, derivational, and inflectional entropy) characteristics on tasks such as lexical decision (i.e., discriminating between a word and nonwords such as FLIRP) and speeded pronunciation (i.e., reading letter strings aloud) In addition to these variables, there is increasing evidence that semantic richness (i.e., the extent to which words are associated with relatively more semantic information) is an important predictor of word recognition performance (see Pexman, 2012, for a review). While every variable produced significant effects in at least one task, only the effects of imageability and number of features were reliable (or borderline reliable) across all tasks, indicating that imaginal and featural aspects may be weighted relatively more heavily in a word’s semantic representation

Objectives

Results

Discussion

Conclusion