Semantic Activation of Noun Concepts in Context

A modified Stoop procedure was used to examine the role that context plays in guiding semantic access of unambiguous nouns in sentence contexts. The sentences either emphasized a high- or a low-dominant property of a noun that was the last word in the sentence or were control sentences. Each sentenc...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition memory, and cognition, 1985-01, Vol.11 (1), p.126-135
Main Authors: Whitney, Paul, McKay, Timothy, Kellas, George, Emerson, William A
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Attention
Biological and medical sciences
Cognition. Intelligence
Color Perception
Contextual Associations
Cues
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Humans
Interference (Learning)
Nouns
Psycholinguistics
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Reaction Time
Reasoning. Problem solving
Semantics
Sentence Comprehension
Set (Psychology)
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Summary:A modified Stoop procedure was used to examine the role that context plays in guiding semantic access of unambiguous nouns in sentence contexts. The sentences either emphasized a high- or a low-dominant property of a noun that was the last word in the sentence or were control sentences. Each sentence was followed by the relevant high- or low-dominant property either immediately or after a 300-or a 600-ms delay. There was significant color-naming interference (relative to control) for high-dominant properties regardless of biasing context in the immediate and delayed conditions. There was also significant color-naming interference for low-dominant properties in the immediate condition regardless of context. However, in the delayed conditions, the low-dominant properties led to color-naming interference only when preceded by sentence contexts biasing interpretation toward the low-dominant property. It was concluded that high-dominant properties function as core, or invariant, aspects of meaning and that initial semantic access is context independent.
ISSN:0278-7393
1939-1285
DOI:10.1037/0278-7393.11.1.126