Prime Words Research Articles

The Affordance Directive: Affordance Priming Facilitates Object Detection Similar to Semantic Priming.

The present study investigated differences in priming perceptions of target objects via affordance or semantic primes. Affordances denote possibilities for action in relation to objects (e.g., chair - sit), whereas semantic primes describe related concepts and features of objects (e.g., chair - legs). In Experiments 1A/1B the effects of affordance and semantic priming were compared via a semantic-categorization task using a normed word list of objects. In Experiments 2-4 we investigated affordance priming on object identification of pictures using a shoebox-classification task. In Experiment 1A participants were asked to respond by categorizing the presented word as concrete or abstract. Experiment 1B was similar to 1A, but with a 1000 ms response deadline. Experiment 2 presented target objects as words or photographs. Experiment 3 presented target objects as photographs degraded at three levels (clear, medium blur, extreme blur). Experiment 4 presented target objects as photographs that began degraded and slowly became clear. Experiment 1B found word priming for semantic primes, but not affordances. In contrast, Experiments 2-4 found object priming was facilitated by both affordances and semantic primes. Collectively, our results indicate that affordances facilitate object classification.

Event-Related Potential (ERP) evidence for fluency and disfluency effects on recognition memory

Masked priming is used in recognition memory studies to alter fluency and create familiarity. Primes are flashed briefly before target words that are considered for a recognition judgment. Matching primes are hypothesized to produce greater familiarity by increasing the perceptual fluency of the target word. Experiment 1 tested this claim by contrasting match primes (i.e., “RIGHT” primes “RIGHT”), semantic primes (e.g., “LEFT” primes “RIGHT”), and orthographically similar (OS) primes (e.g., “SIGHT” primes “RIGHT”) while recording event-related potentials (ERPs). Relative to match primes, OS primes elicited fewer “old” responses and more negative ERPs during the interval associated with familiarity (300–500 ms). This result was replicated when control primes consisting of unrelated words (Experiment 2) or symbols (Experiment 3) were inserted into the sequence. The behavioral and ERP evidence suggest that word primes are perceived as a unit and the prime word activation will affect target fluency and recognition judgments. When the prime matches the target, fluency is increased and more familiarity experiences are created. When the primes are words that do not match the target, fluency is decreased (disfluency) and fewer familiarity experiences result. This evidence suggests that the effects of disfluency on recognition should be carefully considered.

Out-of-vocabulary but not meaningless: Evidence for semantic-priming effects in pseudoword processing.

Nonarbitrary phenomena in language, such as systematic association in the form-meaning interface, have been widely reported in the literature. Exploiting such systematic associations previous studies have demonstrated that pseudowords can be indicative of meaning. However, whether semantic activation from words and pseudowords is supported by the very same processes, activating a common semantic memory system, is currently not known. Here, we take advantage of recent progresses from computational linguistics models allowing to induce meaning representations for out-of-vocabulary strings of letters via domain-general associative-learning mechanisms applied to natural language. We combined these models with data from priming tasks, in which participants are showed two strings of letters presented sequentially one after the other and are then asked to indicate if the latter is a word or a pseudoword. In Experiment 1 we reanalyzed the data of the largest behavioral database on semantic priming, while in Experiment 2 we ran an independent replication on a new language, Italian, controlling for a series of possible confounds. Results were consistent across the two experiments and showed that the prime-word meaning interferes with the semantic pattern elicited by the target pseudoword (i.e., at increasing estimated semantic relatedness between prime word and target pseudoword, participants' reaction times increased and accuracy decreased). These findings indicate that the same associative mechanisms governing word meaning also subserve the processing of pseudowords, suggesting in turn that human semantic memory can be conceived as a distributional system that builds upon a general-purpose capacity of extracting knowledge from complex statistical patterns. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Can Translation Equivalents in L1 Activated by L2 Produce Homophonic Interference: An Eye Movement Study of Cross-Language Lexical Activation in Chinese English Learners.

This study used an eye-tracking method to examine whether Chinese translation equivalents activated by English prime words can continue to activate their Chinese homophones. With 30 English prime words, and 60 Chinese target words as materials, the experiment used a Tobii eye-tracking device to collect data from 30 university students while completing an English-Chinese lexical semantic-judgment task, aimed at investigating whether (1) when Chinese English learners see the English words, they can activate the homophones of Chinese translation equivalents; and (2) there is a word frequency effect in cross-language lexical activation, i.e., Chinese translation equivalents with different word frequencies have different effects on the activation speed. Compared with low-frequency Chinese translation equivalents, high-frequency Chinese equivalents can facilitate the activation faster and easier. The two research hypotheses were confirmed on several eye movement indicators, supporting the cross-language lexical activation as well as word-frequency effect of Chinese translation equivalents. This is also the first verification of cross-language dual-link lexical activation which engage both semantics and phonology, indicating that L2-L1 semantic activation has strong stability for further phonological activation.

How does language affect spatial attention? Deconstructing the prime-target relationship.

It is still unclear how spatially associated concepts (e.g., directional expressions, object names, metaphors) shape our cognitive experience. Here, two experiments (N = 156) investigated the mechanisms by which words with either explicit or implicit spatial meaning induce spatial attention shifts. Participants performed a visual target-discrimination task according to response rules that required different degrees of prime and target processing depth. For explicit prime words, we found spatial congruency effects independent of processing depth, while implicit prime words generated congruency effects only when participants had to compute the congruency relationship. These results were robust across different prime-target intervals and imply that spatial connotations alone do not automatically activate spatial attention shifts. Instead, explicit semantic analysis is a prerequisite for conceptual cueing.

A study on the phenomenon of anaphoric correction in college students’ English conversation

Abstract English education for college students is a major instructional programme with significant developmental importance; yet, its conversations are also crucial. Reflexivity in conversational repair refers to the tendency of speakers to go back to the beginning of the repairing component rather than to implement the repair directly after the wrong word. In order to help listeners solve the connection problem, speakers use different back-referencing strategies. In this study, we used a quantitative and qualitative approach to explore the patterns and strategies of finger-back repair in Chinese college students’ English conversations and to compare their similarities and differences with native speakers in the use of finger-back onset words. The study found that the proportion of self-repetition was the highest among college students, reaching about 75%, and the proportion of reorganisation and insertion strategies was very small, about 23%, which reflected the characteristics of college students’ ability in linguistic information processing and online processing; moreover, there were significant differences between them and native speakers in the use of reflexive priming words. This paper borrows from the attention theory of cognitive psychology to explain the results and to point out the implications of this study for the teaching of spoken English in college.

Extract Similarities from Syntactic Contexts: a Distributional Semantic Model Based on Syntactic Distance

Distributional Semantics (DS) models are based on the idea that two words which appear in similar contexts, i.e. similar neighborhoods, have similar meanings. This concept was originally presented by Harris in his Distributional Hypothesis (DH) (Harris 1954). Even though DH forms the basis of the majority of DS models, Harris states in later works that only syntactic analysis can allow for a more precise formulation of the neighborhoods involved: the arguments and the operators.In this work, we present a DS model based on the concept of Syntactic Distance inspired by a study of Harris’s theories concerning the syntactic-semantic interface. In our model, the context of each word is derived from its dependency network generated by a parser. With this strategy, the co-occurring terms of a target word are calculated on the basis of their syntactic relations, which are also preserved in the event of syntactical transformations. The model, named Syntactic Distance as Word Window (SD-W2), has been tested on three state-of-the-art tasks: Semantic Distance, Synonymy and Single Word Priming, and compared with other classical DS models. In addition, the model has been subjected to a new test based on Operator-Argument selection. Although the results obtained by SD-W2 do not always reach those of modern contextualized models, they are often above average and, in many cases, they are comparable with the result of GLOVE or BERT.

A family study of symbolic learning and synaptic plasticity in autism spectrum disorder.

The current study presents a male with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and a 3q29 deletion, and three healthy first-degree relatives. Our magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) dataset included a healthy control subset. We describe a comprehensive multimodal approach, including equivalence class formation, neurocognitive testing, MRI, and electroencephalography (EEG)-based cortical plasticity, which can provide new insights into socio-communicative and learning impairments and neural underpinnings in ASD. On neurocognitive testing, the proband showed reduced processing speed, attending behavior, and executive function. He required more training trials in equivalence class training compared with family members and exhibited impaired priming of words compared with priming with images. The proband had smaller intracranial volume and surface area and a larger visual evoked potential (VEP) C1 amplitude than family members and intact long-term potentiation (LTP)-like visual cortex plasticity. Together, these results suggest that 3q29 deletion-related ASD is associated with impaired problem-solving strategies in complex socio-communicative and learning tasks, smaller intracranial and surface area, altered VEP amplitude, and normal LTP-like visual cortex plasticity. Further studies are needed to clarify whether this multimodal approach can be used to identify ASD subgroups with distinct neurobiological alterations and to uncover mechanisms underlying socio-communicative and learning impairments. Lay Summary: We studied learning, brain activity, and brain structure in a person with autism and a genetic aberration, and his close relatives. Compared with relatives, the person with autism required more training for learning, and visual learning was better than verbal learning. This person had some changes in the activity of the visual cortex, and the size and the surface area of the brain were reduced. Knowledge about learning and brain mechanisms is valuable for the development of training programs for individuals with autism.

Cognitively Accessible Words Associated with God as Effective Lexical Primes

Do the words used to prime the concept of God in psychology of religion research studies accurately reflect a mental representation of God? To examine this, two samples completed a free-association task, where they listed 10 words that came to mind when they thought about God (Studies 1a–1b). We found that more than half of the lexical primes used in previous studies were rarely or never produced (< 5 times) in the 2,610 free-association responses. Using a false memory paradigm, Study 2 revealed that the most frequent free-association words produced in Studies 1a and 1b more effectively primed the concept of God than a set of prime words used in previous religious priming studies that were not frequent free-association words in Studies 1a and 1b. This research advances the methodological practices in religious priming research and contributes to an understanding of people’s thoughts about God.

Neural correlates of semantic matching in indirect priming

Electrophysiological and functional neuroimaging studies have demonstrated the role of a left temporo-parietal brain network in prospective processing during direct priming (“body” – “hand”) using a short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). In contrast, indirect priming (“lion” – “stripes” related through “tiger”) has been related to the activation of right hemisphere regions such as the supramarginal and middle frontal gyri and the insula involved in automatic semantic processing. Postlexical retrospective strategies like semantic matching, compound cue or episodic retrieval have been largely neglected even though there is consistent evidence of their contribution to direct and indirect priming. The present study was designed to map the brain regions participating in semantic priming based on postlexical retrospective semantic matching. 16 right-handed Spanish speakers (ages 20–40, 50 % male) were given a visual lexical decision task in a 1.5 T scanner with a TR of 3.5 s to obtain BOLD activations. In order to reduce the effects of automatic spreading activation on priming we used a long SOA (800 ms). To minimize the effects of expectancy, we increased the related-unrelated ratio to 1:2 (20 related, 40 unrelated, 20 pseudowords) and employed an indirect priming paradigm with weakly associated targets to enhance the effects of semantic matching. Each 3500 ms trial consisted on a fixation screen for 1000 ms followed by a 100 ms black screen, then the prime word for 600 ms, another black screen for 200 ms, the target word/pseudoword for 600 ms and finally a response screen for 1000 ms. Response time was longer for pseudowords compared to related and unrelated targets. An increased activity was found in lIFG for related pairs and pseudowords, whereas a large cluster of activation was found in left fusiform gyrus for unrelated pairs. Right insula was also activated for unrelated and pseudoword conditions. Furthermore, all conditions showed a decreased activity in left precuneus/parieto-occipital sulcus. These data addressed the role of frontal, temporal, parietal and insular regions in retrospective semantic matching with a differential pattern according to the lexical retrieval, selection and inhibition processes required to make a lexical decision.

The Effect of Exercise Intensity on Affective and Repetition Priming in Middle-Aged Adults.

Previous research has shown that physical exercise improves memory. In the present study, we investigated the possible effects of the intensity of physical exercise as a function of the affective valence of words on implicit memory. In the study, 79 young adult volunteers were randomly assigned to perform moderate- (50% VO2max) or high-intensity exercise (80% VO2max) on a stationary bike. Once the required exercise intensity was achieved, participants performed an affective and repetition priming task concurrently with the physical exercise. Both groups showed similar repetition priming. The moderate-intensity exercise group showed affective priming with positive words, while affective priming was not found in the high-intensity exercise group. Facilitation occurred in both groups when a negative target word was preceded by a positive prime word. Our results suggest that the positive effect of physical exercise on memory is modulated by the affective valence of the stimuli. It seems that moderate-intensity exercise is more beneficial for implicit memory than high-intensity exercise.

The neurophysiology of the intervention strategies of Awareness Training Program on emotion regulation.

Emotion regulation is essential for healthy living. Previous studies have found that mental training such as compassion meditation could help with emotion regulation. However, the underlying neural mechanism and possible intervention strategies of group-based Mahayana Buddhist intervention involved in emotion regulation are still unclear. This event-related potential (ERP) study investigated how compassion and wisdom meditations, two key components of the Awareness Training Program (ATP), may regulate emotion during different mental processing stages, namely attention deployment, cognitive change, and response modification. Eighty-five middle-aged working adults with moderate stress were voluntarily recruited for this study, using a 128-channel electroencephalogram system. After 7 weeks of training, participants (ATP attendance, n = 42; waitlist control, n = 43) were instructed to view negative pictures while practicing compassion or wisdom meditation, with corresponding priming words. Another normal priming condition and a neutral picture condition were set as control conditions. ERP results in the ATP group showed that negative pictures induced greater prefrontal activity (N400 component) in both compassion and wisdom meditation conditions compared with the normal condition, while the control group showed little difference between the conditions. Significantly higher heart rate variability was found in the compassion but not wisdom meditation when compared with the neutral priming condition. Correspondent changes in behavioural data were also found. Converging evidence showed that compassion meditation training could modulate negative emotion processing in stages of attention deployment, cognitive change, and behavioural responses. The prefrontal lobe could play an important role in the process of emotion regulation by compassion meditation, possibly due to the emphasis of the ATP on contemplative practices.

The Effects of Word Priming on Emotion Classification from Neurological Signals.

Affective states play an important role in human behavior and decision-making. In recent years, several affective brain-computer interface (aBCI) studies have focused on developing an emotion classifier based on elicited emotions within the user. However, it is difficult to achieve consistency in elicited emotions across populations, which can lead to dataset imbalances. The experimental design presented in this paper seeks to avoid consistency issues by asking the participant to classify the emotion portrayed in images of facial expressions, rather than their own emotions. Priming is also a common technique used in psychology studies that is known to influence emotional perception. To improve participant accuracy, we investigated matching and mis-matched word priming for the facial expression images. Electro-encephalogram (EEG) data were used to generate images fed into a classifier based on the Big Transfer model, BiT-M R101x1. The primed images resulted in higher classification accuracy overall. Further, by building different classifier models for both mis-matched primed images and matching primed images, we were able to achieve classification accuracies above 90%. We also provided the classifier with the true labels of the photographs instead of the labels generated by the participants and achieved similar results. The experimental paradigm of measuring brain activity during the emotional classification of another individual provides consistently high, balanced classification accuracies.

EFEKTIVITAS SEMANTIK PRIMING DALAM ATASI FENOMENA TIP OF THE TONGUE

The obstacle in accessing words that have been stored in memory is called the Tip of the Tongue phenomenon (ToT). This study aimed to measure the effectiveness of semantic priming techniques and sub lexicon codes in facilitating the process of accessing the lexicon when the subjects are in ToT state. This research is a qualitative descriptive study where the researcher conducted an experiment with a psycholinguistic analysis approach. The data are in the form of target words, prime words, and the success rate of the subject in recalling words. The data were obtained from the experiments, interviews, and observations involving 8 students at the tertiary level with an age range of 18-22 years. The results showed that the effectiveness rate of semantic priming in the process of accessing the lexicon is 67,6%, onset 8,9%, first syllable 23,5%. In addition, there were also factors that influenced the subjects' success in recalling words, such as age, character and intelligence, subject selective processes, inhibiting words, health and word acquisition processes. To conclude, priming associative semantics was quite effective in helping the subject recall words when the subject in the Tip of the Tongue State.

Illustration of attention mechanism in LSTM algorithm for analyzing its performance

The advent of technologies and equipments in Information Technology and Communication has increased the use of smart phones and social media by all people irrespective of age and gender. Many times people find social media posts as the outlet for draining all their emotions. Depression is a common mental health problem that ranges from low mood and loss of interest to persistent feeling of sadness and self-destruction. Mental Health Experts are interested in analyzing the physical and social media behavior of patients to diagnose depression. Attention Mechanism imitates the human cognitive of considering only the most relevant data needed for a particular analysis. LSTM is a state-of-the-art Recurrent Neural Network architecture used for depression analysis. In this paper we are further improving the LSTM Algorithm by proposing an Attention Mechanism that makes the model robust and improved. This major role of our Attention Mechanism is identifying the Prime Words and Supporting words that are relevant for the analysis. Distance is calculated between non-prime words and prime words, weights are assigned based on this calculation, higher weight being given to most relevant words. Making use of Attention helps us to focus only on the relevant data and neglect the irrelevant data.

Investigation of collocational priming in tertiary level Turkish EFL learners’ mental lexicon

Much research in EFL context investigated language use of the learners in terms of lexical combinations but failed to recognize collocations in terms of psycholinguistic framework. Inspired by Lexical Priming Theory, the current study both emphasizes that collocations are not only textual but also psychological phenomena and underlines that non-native-like language use by EFL learners may stem from the fact that collocations are not mentally represented as a single unit in mental lexicon. Thus, a lexical decision task was designed where the participants were asked to classify the words flashing on their screens as words/ non-words. Reaction times concluded that verb-noun collocations are not primed in the learners’ mental lexicon. Mixed effects modelling analysis demonstrated the frequency of the prime words in collocations had a significant effect in the process. The findings were discussed in the light of vocabulary acquisition theories, and suggestions were provided for further research.

The impact of prior topic awareness on listening effort during speech perception

Most standard speech perception tests use unrelated sentences where the topic changes for each stimulus. This unrealistic paradigm is expedient but might overlook an important aspect of speech processing and effort, which is how listeners use expectations and topic awareness to enable easier repair of misperceived words. We hypothesize that the effort of mentally repairing misperceived words will be reduced when individuals have advance topic awareness of upcoming sentences. In this study, individuals with normal hearing and hearing loss heard sentences with a masked target word that required retroactive mental repair using later context. Sentences were either preceded by the presence or absence of a related priming word presented visually to simulate advance topic knowledge. Listening effort for these sentences was measured by changes in pupil size that were linked with the exact timing of the word being repaired. When the target word is masked in a sentence, pupil dilation increases immediately after the missing word, and that dilation is modulated by the helpfulness of the prime before the sentence.

Investigating the locus of transposed-phoneme effects using cross-modal priming

In this study, we examined whether the facilitatory priming effect found when auditory primes and targets are related by a phoneme transposition (e.g., /ʀͻb/-/bͻʀ/: Dufour & Grainger, 2019, 2020) is also observed under cross-modal presentation. In two experiments using the same materials as in the previous studies, we found no evidence for a facilitatory priming effect when the targets were presented visually rather than auditorily. On the contrary, an inhibitory priming effect was found when both unrelated words (Experiment 1; e.g., /mas/-/bͻR/) and vowel overlap words (Experiment 2; e.g., /vͻl/-/bͻʀ/) were used as control conditions. In Experiment 2, this inhibitory effect was found to be equivalent in size whether the target words were of higher or lower frequency than the prime words (e.g. /ʀͻb/-/bͻʀ/ vs. /bͻʀ/-/ʀͻb/). We interpret this pattern of effects as reflecting the greater impact of word-level inhibition in cross-modal priming, and the parallel influence of prime-target relative frequency on bottom-up phoneme-to-word facilitation and word-level inhibition. Therefore, the facilitatory priming effect previously observed with auditory primes and targets would mainly reflect bottom-up activation of the target word representation during prime word processing.

Semantic feature activation takes time: longer SOA elicits earlier priming effects during reading.

While most previous studies of “semantic” priming confound associative and semantic relations, here we use a simple co-occurrence-based approach to examine “pure” semantic priming, while experimentally controlling for associative relations. We define associative relations by the co-occurrence of words in the sentences of a large text corpus. Contextual-semantic feature overlap, in contrast, is defined by the number of common associates that the prime shares with the target. Then we revisit the spreading activation theory and examine whether a long vs. short time available for semantic feature activation leads to early vs. late viewing time effects on the target words of a sentence reading experiment. We independently manipulate contextual-semantic feature overlap of two primes with one target word in sentences of the form pronoun, verb prime, article, adjective prime and target noun, e. g., "She rides the gray elephant." The results showed that long-SOA (verb-noun) overlap reduces early single and first fixation durations of the target noun, and short-SOA (adjective-noun) overlap reduces late go-past durations. This result pattern can be explained by the spreading activation theory: The semantic features of the prime words need some time to become sufficiently active before they can reliably affect target processing. Therefore, the verb can act on the target noun's early eye-movement measures presented three words later, while the adjective is presented immediately prior to the target—thus a difficult adjective-noun semantic integration leads to a late sentence re-examination of the preceding words.

N400 event-related brain potential and functional outcome in persons at clinical high risk for psychosis: A longitudinal study.

The N400 event-related brain potential (ERP) semantic priming effect is thought to reflect activation by meaningful stimuli of related concepts in semantic memory and has been found to be deficient in schizophrenia. We tested the hypothesis that, among individuals at clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis, N400 semantic priming deficits predict worse symptomatic and functional outcomes after one year. We measured N400 semantic priming at baseline in CHR patients (n=47) and healthy control participants (n=25) who viewed prime words each followed by a related or unrelated target word, at stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 300 or 750 ms. We measured patients' psychosis-like symptoms with the Scale of Prodromal Symptoms (SOPS) Positive subscale, and academic/occupational and social functioning with the Global Functioning (GF):Role and Social scales, respectively, at baseline and one-year follow-up (n=29). CHR patients exhibited less N400 semantic priming than controls across SOAs; planned contrasts indicated this difference was significant at the 750-ms but not the 300-ms SOA. In patients, reduced N400 semantic priming at the 750-ms SOA was associated with lower GF:Social scores at follow-up, and greater GF:Social decrements from baseline to follow-up. Patients' N400 semantic priming was not associated with SOPS Positive or GF:Role scores at follow-up, or change in these from baseline to follow-up. In CHR patients, reduced N400 semantic priming at baseline predicted worse social functioning after one year, and greater decline in social functioning over this period. Thus, the N400 may be a useful prognostic biomarker of real-world functional outcome in CHR patients.