Semantic Priming meaning between words

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Semantic Primingmeaning between words

• Suzy Styles
• Department of Experimental Psychology
• University of Oxford

Short Notes, 2006
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• What do we know about the words we know?

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• One way of thinking about the meanings of words
  is to consider their connections to other words

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For example, we know

• cat dog are the same kind of thing
• (animal or even pet)
• cat dog look similar
• (compared to, say, car)
• cats dogs is a common phrase
• (compared to elephants and goldfish)
• dogs chase cats in stories cartoons

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• In a game called Word Associations we ask
  people to write down the first word they think of
  when given a single word to think about

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• If I say cat, three quarters of British people
  respond with dog
• Other people will give responses like bird,
  rabbit, mouse and animal
• Moss (1996) Birkbeck Word Association Norms

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• If we next ask about dog, lots of peoples
  first response is cat an answer looping back
  neatly to the first question!
• Many other answers also refer back to words from
  the first task

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• Heres an example of an Associative Network,
  where you can see the flow of ideas each word
  inspires
• Collins Loftus (1975)
• Note how interconnected the network becomes
• Clusters start to form

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Associative Network
fish
tiger
animal
farm
bear
bird
dog
house
cat
rabbit
fur
mouse
furry
fox
cheese
rat
rodent
Based on data from Moss (1996) Birkbeck Word
Association Norms
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• We can test these word-word relationships using a
  technique called lexical priming
• Meyer Schvanerveldt (1971)

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Lexical Priming

• People make a yes/no decision about whether a
  set of letters is a word
• When two words come one after another, the
  word-pair can be carefully selected

KENLO
MERUD
APPLE
TOLKN
CHIGH
DOCTOR
LIBRARY
DOCTOR
NURSE
OR
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Lexical Priming

• There is a facilitation effect for the second
  word when the two words are related
• (eg. doctor-nurse but not doctor-library)
• People are faster
• And more accurate
• Meyer Schvanereveldt (1971)
• Antos (1979)
• This is called a priming effect

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Baby Primes

• At the Oxford BabyLab we are developing an
  infant-friendly version of the adult priming
  task

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Baby Primes

• We hope to investigate the early stages of
  lexical development

• And to discover when structured knowledge begins
  to affect babies language processing

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• Supported by
• The British Council The Clarendon Fund
• The BabyLab Team
• Prof. Kim Plunkett
• Dr. Gert Westermann
• Dr. Natalia Arias-Trejo
• Dr. Nivedita Mani
• Loukia Taxitari
• Vanja Vucetic
• Jennifer Boyd
• Special thanks to the staff of the John Radcliffe
  Hospital

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• Selected References
• Antos (1979)
• Processing facilitation in a lexical decision
  task. Journal of Experimental Psychology Human
  Perception and Performance, 5(3), 527-545.
• Collins Loftus (1975)
• A spreading-activation theory of semantic
  processing. Psychological Review, 82(6), 407-428.
• Meyer Schvanereveldt (1971)
• Facilitation in recognising pairs of words
  Evidence of a dependence between retrieval
  operations. Journal of Experimental Psychology,
  90, 227-234
• Moss Older (1996)
• Birkbeck Word Association Norms, Hove, UK
  Psychology Press.