Introduction to the research topic meaning in mind: semantic richness effects in language processing

Sensorimotor effects in surprise word memory - A registered report

Sensorimotor grounding of semantic information elicits inconsistent effects on word memory, depending on which type of experience is involved, with some aspects of sensorimotor information facilitating memory performance while others inhibit it. In particular, information relating to the body appears to impair word recognition memory by increasing false alarms, which may be due either to an adaptive advantage for survival-relevant information (whereby words pertaining to the body spread activation to other concepts and generate a confusable memory trace) or to a somatic attentional mechanism (whereby words pertaining to the body activate a false sense of touch that renders their representations less distinctive as memory trace and retrieval cue). To date, the existing literature does not distinguish between these two explanations. We set out to adjudicate between them using a surprise (incidental) memory task, where participants study the words under a guise of a lexical decision task, which allowed us to examine how participants form a memory trace for words grounded in bodily experience. We found support for the somatic attentional account, as body-related words increased false alarms even when attention was not directed to them at the study phase. Overall, the results provide further evidence for the importance of distinctiveness in word memory, and suggest a reinterpretation of the role of semantic richness in word memory.

Verbal deception in picture naming

Telling a lie requires several cognitive processes. We investigated three cognitive processes involved in verbal deception: the decision to deceive, the suppression of the true statement, and the construction of the false statement. In a standard picture-naming task, participants were instructed to commit true and false naming statements. Critically, participants could freely decide to name the picture (i.e., true naming events) or to commit a verbal deception and use a different name (i.e., false naming events). Different types of analysis were performed with the aim of exploring the influence of semantic, lexical, and phonological information of the target picture in the decision, suppression, and construction processes. The first type of analysis revealed that participants decided to lie more often when the target picture was less typical or less familiar. The second and third types of analysis focused on the false naming events. False naming latencies turned out to be faster when the name of the target picture was a highly frequent or an earlier-acquired name, suggesting an influence of lexical variables in the suppression of the true statement. The third analysis type explored the phonological relationship between the word that participants uttered in the false statements and the target picture name. No phonological influences emerged in this last analysis. These findings demonstrate that verbal deception is tied to semantic and lexical variables corresponding to true statements.

Effects of semantic variables on word production in aphasia

Words differ in the complexity of their semantic representations and their relationships to other words and these differences can be operationalised as a variety of semantic variables. The research presented here investigates how word production in aphasia is influenced by six feature-based semantic variables (number of near semantic neighbours, semantic similarity, number of semantic features, typicality, intercorrelational density, and distinctiveness). Previous research has reported inconsistent findings for some of the semantic variables, while others have not been previously studied in aphasia. Spoken picture naming data from a large group of individuals with aphasia with mixed spoken word production impairments (n = 175) and a sub-group who produced few phonological errors (n = 60) was analysed. We examined effects of the semantic variables on overall naming accuracy and on the occurrence of different error types (semantic errors overall, coordinate errors, omissions), while controlling for other psycholinguistic variables using generalised linear mixed effects models and Bayesian correlations. Across analyses, number of semantic features was the most important predictor with a facilitatory main effect on naming accuracy in the sub-group analysis. Number of semantic features, along with typicality and semantic similarity, also predicted error types and in some analyses these effects depended on the integrity of semantic processing. Effects of the semantic variables and their theoretical explanations and implications are discussed in light of previous research and models of word production.

Paired-associate learning, animacy, and imageability effects in the survival advantage

The current study examined animacy and paired-associate learning through a survival-processing paradigm (Nairne et al. in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33(2), 263-273, 2007; Schwartz & Brothers, 2014). English-speaking monolingual participants were asked to learn a set of new word translations to improve their chances of survival or to improve their study abroad experience. Animate and inanimate words were included in this task, to further examine animacy effects in cued recall paradigms (Popp & Serra in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42(2), 186-201, 2016; VanArsdall et al. in Experimental Psychology, 60(3), 172-178, 2013). Across sentence-completion, matching, and picture-naming tasks, learning was facilitated by the survival context, relative to the study abroad context and an intentional learning condition. Scenario ratings indicated this survival advantage could also be a function of higher imageability ratings for the survival context than for the study abroad context. Replicating previous findings with cued recall, inanimate words were overall better remembered than animate words, across all three tasks, though survival processing facilitated language-learning for both animate and inanimate categories. This 'reverse animacy effect' replicated previous findings by Popp and Serra (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42(2), 186-201, 2016), showing animate words can interfere with a participant's ability to create associations with their words, including those in a new language. These results are discussed with regards to the widely-reliable survival and animacy advantages, with a particular emphasis on the role of imageability in this paradigm.

Semantic Ambiguity: Do Multiple Meanings Inhibit or Facilitate Word Recognition?

It is not clear whether multiple unrelated meanings inhibit or facilitate word recognition. Some studies have found a disadvantage for words having multiple meanings with respect to unambiguous words in lexical decision tasks (LDT), whereas several others have shown a facilitation for such words. In the present study, we argue that these inconsistent findings may be due to the approach employed to select ambiguous words across studies. To address this issue, we conducted three LDT experiments in which we varied the measure used to classify ambiguous and unambiguous words. The results suggest that multiple unrelated meanings facilitate word recognition. In addition, we observed that the approach employed to select ambiguous words may affect the pattern of experimental results. This evidence has relevant implications for theoretical accounts of ambiguous words processing and representation.

The role of variability in the property listing task

It is generally believed that concepts can be characterized by their properties (or features). When investigating concepts encoded in language, researchers often ask subjects to produce lists of properties that describe them (i.e., the Property Listing Task, PLT). These lists are accumulated to produce Conceptual Property Norms (CPNs). CPNs contain frequency distributions of properties for individual concepts. It is widely believed that these distributions represent the underlying semantic structure of those concepts. Here, instead of focusing on the underlying semantic structure, we aim at characterizing the PLT. An often disregarded aspect of the PLT is that individuals show intersubject variability (i.e., they produce only partially overlapping lists). In our study we use a mathematical analysis of this intersubject variability to guide our inquiry. To this end, we resort to a set of publicly available norms that contain information about the specific properties that were informed at the individual subject level. Our results suggest that when an individual is performing the PLT, he or she generates a list of properties that is a mixture of general and distinctive properties, such that there is a non-linear tendency to produce more general than distinctive properties. Furthermore, the low generality properties are precisely those that tend not to be repeated across lists, accounting in this manner for part of the intersubject variability. In consequence, any manipulation that may affect the mixture of general and distinctive properties in lists is bound to change intersubject variability. We discuss why these results are important for researchers using the PLT.

The human brain from above: an increase in complexity from environmental stimuli to abstractions

Contrary to common belief, the brain appears to increase the complexity from the perceived object to the idea of it. Topological models predict indeed that: (a) increases in anatomical/functional dimensions and symmetries occur in the transition from the environment to the higher activities of the brain, and (b) informational entropy in the primary sensory areas is lower than in the higher associative ones. To demonstrate this novel hypothesis, we introduce a straightforward approach to measuring island information levels in fMRI neuroimages, via Rényi entropy derived from tessellated fMRI images. This approach facilitates objective detection of entropy and corresponding information levels in zones of fMRI images generally not taken into account. We found that the Rényi entropy is higher in associative cortices than in the visual primary ones. This suggests that the brain lies in dimensions higher than the environment and that it does not concentrate, but rather dilutes messages coming from external inputs.

Semantic Richness Effects in Syntactic Classification: The Role of Feedback

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.

Emotion Word Type and Affective Valence Priming at a Long Stimulus Onset Asynchrony

As the division between emotion and emotion-laden words has been viewed as controversial by, for example, Kousta and colleagues, the current study attempted a replication and extension of findings previously described by Kazanas and Altarriba. In their findings, Kazanas and Altarriba reported significant differences in response times (RTs) and priming effects between emotion and emotion-laden words, with faster RTs and larger priming effects with emotion words than with emotion-laden words. These findings were consistent across unmasked (Experiment 1) and masked (Experiment 2) versions of a lexical decision task, where participants either explicitly or implicitly processed the prime words of each prime-target word pair. Findings from Experiment 2 have been previously replicated by Kazanas and Altarriba with a Spanish–English bilingual sample, when tested in English, the participants’ functionally dominant language. The current study was designed to extend these previous findings, using a l000-ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), which was longer than the 250-ms SOA originally used by Kazanas and Altarriba. Findings from the current study supported the division between emotion and emotion-laden words, as they replicated those previously described by Kazanas and Altarriba. In addition, the current study determined that negative words were processed significantly slower in this experiment, with a long SOA (replicating findings by Rossell and Nobre).

Effects of Emotional Experience in Lexical Decision

Previous research has examined the effects of emotional experience (i.e., the ease with which words evoke emotion information) in semantic categorization (SCT), word naming, and Stroop tasks (Newcombe et al., 2012; Siakaluk et al., 2014; Moffat et al., 2015). However, to date there are no published reports on whether emotional experience influences performance in the lexical decision task (LDT). In the present study, we examined the influence of emotional experience in LDT using three different stimulus sets. In Experiment 1 we used a stimulus set used by both Kousta et al. (2009; Experiment 1) and Yap and Seow (2014) that is comprised of 40 negative, 40 positive, and 40 neutral words; in Experiment 2 we used a stimulus set comprised of 150 abstract nouns; and in Experiment 3 we used a stimulus set comprised of 373 verbs. We observed facilitatory effects of emotional experience in each of the three experiments, such that words with higher emotional experience ratings were associated with faster response latencies. These results are important because the influence of emotional experience: (a) is observed in stimulus sets comprised of different types of words, demonstrating the generalizability of the effect in LDT; (b) accounts for LDT response latency variability above and beyond the influences of valence and arousal, and is thus a robust dimension of conceptual knowledge; (c) suggests that a richer representation of emotional experience provides more reliable evidence that a stimulus is a word, which facilitates responding in LDT; and (d) is consistent with grounded cognition frameworks that propose that emotion information may be grounded in bodily experience with the world (Barsalou, 2003, 2009; Vigliocco et al., 2009).

Semantic Richness Effects in Spoken Word Recognition: A Lexical Decision and Semantic Categorization Megastudy

A large number of studies have demonstrated that semantic richness dimensions [e.g., number of features, semantic neighborhood density, semantic diversity , concreteness, emotional valence] influence word recognition processes. Some of these richness effects appear to be task-general, while others have been found to vary across tasks. Importantly, almost all of these findings have been found in the visual word recognition literature. To address this gap, we examined the extent to which these semantic richness effects are also found in spoken word recognition, using a megastudy approach that allows for an examination of the relative contribution of the various semantic properties to performance in two tasks: lexical decision, and semantic categorization. The results show that concreteness, valence, and number of features accounted for unique variance in latencies across both tasks in a similar direction—faster responses for spoken words that were concrete, emotionally valenced, and with a high number of features—while arousal, semantic neighborhood density, and semantic diversity did not influence latencies. Implications for spoken word recognition processes are discussed.

Is More Always Better for Verbs? Semantic Richness Effects and Verb Meaning

We examined how several semantic richness variables contribute to verb meaning, across a number of tasks. Because verbs can vary in tense, and the manner in which tense is coded (i.e., regularity), we also examined how these factors moderated the effects of semantic richness. In Experiment 1 we found that age of acquisition (AoA), valence, arousal and embodiment predicted faster response times in LDT. In Experiment 2 we examined a particular semantic richness variable, verb embodiment, and found that it was moderated by tense and regularity. In Experiment 3a we found that AoA predicted faster response times in verb reading. Finally, in Experiment 3b, semantic diversity predicted response times in a past tense generation task, either facilitating or inhibiting responses for regular or irregular verbs, respectively. These results demonstrate that semantic richness variables contribute to verb meaning even when verbs are presented in isolation, and that these effects depend on several factors unique to verbs.

Recognition during recall failure: Semantic feature matching as a mechanism for recognition of semantic cues when recall fails

Research suggests that a feature-matching process underlies cue familiarity-detection when cued recall with graphemic cues fails. When a test cue (e.g., potchbork) overlaps in graphemic features with multiple unrecalled studied items (e.g., patchwork, pitchfork, pocketbook, pullcork), higher cue familiarity ratings are given during recall failure of all of the targets than when the cue overlaps in graphemic features with only one studied target and that target fails to be recalled (e.g., patchwork). The present study used semantic feature production norms (McRae et al., Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 37, 547-559, 2005) to examine whether the same holds true when the cues are semantic in nature (e.g., jaguar is used to cue cheetah). Indeed, test cues (e.g., cedar) that overlapped in semantic features (e.g., a_tree, has_bark, etc.) with four unretrieved studied items (e.g., birch, oak, pine, willow) received higher cue familiarity ratings during recall failure than test cues that overlapped in semantic features with only two (also unretrieved) studied items (e.g., birch, oak), which in turn received higher familiarity ratings during recall failure than cues that did not overlap in semantic features with any studied items. These findings suggest that the feature-matching theory of recognition during recall failure can accommodate recognition of semantic cues during recall failure, providing a potential mechanism for conceptually-based forms of cue recognition during target retrieval failure. They also provide converging evidence for the existence of the semantic features envisaged in feature-based models of semantic knowledge representation and for those more concretely specified by the production norms of McRae et al. (Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 37, 547-559, 2005).