Abstract
Two experiments examined the size of the typicality effect for true items in a category verification task as a function of the type of false item used. In Experiment 1, compared to the case where false items paired unrelated concepts (“carrot–vehicle”), the typicality effect was much larger when false items paired an exemplar with a category coordinate to its proper category (“carrot–fruit”). In contrast, when false items paired coordinate concepts (“carrot–pea”) or reversed the ordering of subject and predicate terms (“All vegetables are carrots”), the typicality effect did not change in size. Further, the time to verify true sentences did not increase monotonically with the semantic similarity of the two terms used in false sentences. Experiment 2 showed that the pattern of results for coordinate items reflected semantic processing, not simply task difficulty. A combined analysis examined data across multiple experiments, increasing the power of the statistical analysis. The size of the typicality effect when coordinate false items were used was again the same as when false items paired unrelated concepts. The most straightforward explanation of this pattern of results seems to be in terms of a sparse semantic network model of lexical semantic memory, in which labeled links are used to indicate the semantic relation that exists between pairs of words.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Cognition, a section of the journal Frontiers in PsychologyReceived: 18 September 2019 Accepted: 14 January 2020Published: 11 February 2020Citation: Gruenenfelder TM (2020) The Representation of Coordinate Relations in Lexical Semantic Memory
Theories of lexical semantic memory are concerned with how people represent the meanings of words in the mind, and the processes that operate on those meanings
Theories of lexical semantic memory require some mechanism for determining the semantic relation between pairs of words
Summary
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Cognition, a section of the journal Frontiers in PsychologyReceived: 18 September 2019 Accepted: 14 January 2020Published: 11 February 2020. Theories of lexical semantic memory are concerned with how people represent the meanings of words in the mind, and the processes that operate on those meanings. The purpose of the present paper is to replicate and extend an important empirical result from the literature on tests of such theories, and to discuss the theoretical significance of that result. The theoretical implications concern how those relations are represented in memory, and in particular which relations are best captured by associative network models (e.g., Collins and Quillan, 1969; Glass and Holyoak, 1975; Holyoak and Glass, 1975) and which are best captured by feature models (Rips et al, 1973; Smith et al, 1974a,b; Gellatly and Gregg, 1975, 1977; McCloskey and Glucksberg, 1979; Moss et al, 1994; Masson, 1995; McRae et al, 1997; Pexman et al, 2002, 2003; Hino et al, 2006) or distributional models (e.g., Lund and Burgess, 1996; Landauer and Dumais, 1997; Burgess, 1998; Jones and Mewhort, 2007; Mikolov et al, 2013)
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