An Abundance of Riches: Cross-Task Comparisons of Semantic Richness Effects in Visual Word Recognition
Open Access
- 1 January 2012
- journal article
- Published by Frontiers Media SA in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
- Vol. 6, 72
- https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00072
Abstract
There is considerable evidence (e.g., Pexman et al., 2008) that semantically rich words, which are associated with relatively more semantic information, are recognized faster across different lexical processing tasks. The present study extends this earlier work by providing the most comprehensive evaluation to date of semantic richness effects on visual word recognition performance. Specifically, using mixed effects analyses to control for the influence of correlated lexical variables, we considered the impact of number of features, number of senses, semantic neighborhood density, imageability, and body–object interaction across five visual word recognition tasks: standard lexical decision, go/no-go lexical decision, speeded pronunciation, progressive demasking, and semantic classification. Semantic richness effects could be reliably detected in all tasks of lexical processing, indicating that semantic representations, particularly their imaginal and featural aspects, play a fundamental role in visual word recognition. However, there was also evidence that the strength of certain richness effects could be flexibly and adaptively modulated by task demands, consistent with an intriguing interplay between task-specific mechanisms and differentiated semantic processing.Keywords
This publication has 46 references indexed in Scilit:
- The neural correlates of the body-object interaction effect in semantic processingFrontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2012
- Imageability and body–object interaction ratings for 599 multisyllabic nounsBehavior Research Methods, 2011
- Moving beyond Kučera and Francis: A critical evaluation of current word frequency norms and the introduction of a new and improved word frequency measure for American EnglishBehavior Research Methods, 2009
- NoA’s ark: Influence of the number of associates in visual word recognitionPsychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2008
- Windows executable software for the progressive demasking taskBehavior Research Methods, 2008
- Computing the Meanings of Words in Reading: Cooperative Division of Labor Between Visual and Phonological Processes.Psychological Review, 2004
- Ambiguity and synonymy effects in lexical decision, naming, and semantic categorization tasks: Interactions between orthography, phonology, and semantics.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2002
- Cross-modal repetition priming of heterographic homophonesMemory & Cognition, 2001
- Semantic effects in single-word naming.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1995
- A distributed, developmental model of word recognition and naming.Psychological Review, 1989