Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions
Semantic Priming Effects of Highly Typical and Atypical Category Exemplars on Visual Word Recognition in Spanish
Poster Session A, Friday, September 12, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
Miguel Angel Ramirez Sarmiento1; 1Universidad de los Andes
The current study aims to evaluate the effect of lexical typicality (e.g. how popular a word is in its lexical category based on existing normative studies) on visual word recognition in Spanish. Previous research demonstrated the effect of different semantic characteristics of a word, such as familiarity, relatedness and translation equivalence in visual recognition and memorization tasks (Grainger & Frenck-Mestre, 1998; Leroy & Kauchack, 2014). The effect of lexical typicality has mostly been studied in English and in tasks without direct word recognition (e.g. picture naming, relatedness judging) (Crowe & Markschark, 2019). This study intends to fill the gap left by the absence of previous research in Spanish in this area. 38 undergraduate students from Bogotá and Cali, Colombia, participated in an experiment consisting of a semantic categorization task using masked priming. Subjects saw a fixation “###” for 500msec, followed by a prime for 67msec, in lowercase, and finally a target, in uppercase, which only disappeared once they pressed a button. They were asked to decide if the target was a member of a semantic category. All experimental targets belonged to the group tested (e.g. “FRESA” (STRAWBERRY) – frutas (fruits), and primes were organized in 3 conditions: 1) highly typical member of the category (e.g. prime: “manzana” (apple), target: “FRESA” (STRAWBERRY)), 2) atypical member of the category (e.g. prime: “tomate” (tomato), target: “FRESA” (STRAWBERRY)) and 3) unrelated (e.g. prime: “ventana” (window), target: “FRESA” (STRAWBERRY)). Results show statistically significant priming effects of approximately 18 msec in the highly-typical condition, F(1,37)=45.816, p<0.001; and 9 msec in the atypical condition against controls, F(1,37)=7.483, p=0.010. Statistically significant differences were also found between highly typical and atypical primes, F(1,37)=11.172, p=0.002. These results indicate that highly typical members of a semantic category cause a stronger activation of related terms than atypical ones. These findings help elucidate one of the aspects that contributes to the word recall processes in real time, support the idea that the mental lexicon groups semantically related items together as discussed in previous research and theoretical models (i.e. Lakoff (1987)) and converge with the findings from previous experiments (e.g. Jergen and Damian (2005); De Deyne et al. (2016)), which supported the idea that highly typical items are more strongly associated in their semantic networks with their respective categories in comparison to atypical ones.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Lexical Semantics, Reading