Abstract
A specification of the structural characteristics of the mental lexicon is a central goal in word recognition research. Of various word-level characteristics, semantics remains the most resistant to this endeavor. Although there are several theoretically distinct models of lexical semantics with fairly clear operational definitions (e.g., in terms of feature sharing, category membership, associations, or cooccurrences), attempts to empirically adjudicate between these different models have been scarce. In this paper, we present several experiments in which we examined the effects of semantic neighborhood size as defined by two models of lexical semantics—one that defines semantics in terms of associations, and another that defines it in terms of global co-occurrences. We present data that address the question of whether these measures can be fruitfully applied to examinations of lexical activation during visual word recognition. The findings demonstrate that semantic neighborhood can predict performance on both lexical decision and word naming.
Article PDF
References
Ackerman, B. P. (1986). Differences in the associative constraint on retrieval search from a context cue for children and adults.Journal of Experimental Child Psychology,42, 315–344.
Andrews, S. (1992). Frequency and neighborhood effects in lexical decision: Lexical similarity or orthographic redundancy?Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,Memory, & Cognition,18, 234–254.
Andrews, S. (1997). The effect of orthographic similarity on lexical retrieval: Resolving neighborhood conflicts.Psychonomic Bulletin & Review,4, 439–461.
Baayen, R. H., Piepenbrock, R., &Gulikers, L. (1995).The CELEX lexical database [CD-ROM]. Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Bjorklund, D. F., &Jacobs, J. W., III (1985). Associative and categorical processes in children’s memory: The role of automaticity in the development of organization in free recall.Journal of Experimental Child Psychology,39, 599–617.
Borowsky, R., &Masson, M. E. J. (1996). Semantic ambiguity effects in word identification.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,22, 63–85.
Buchanan, L., Brown, N. R., Cabeza, R., &Maitson, C. (1999). False memories and semantic lexicon arrangement.Brain & Language,68, 172–177.
Buchanan, L., Burgess, C., &Lund, K. (1998). Overcrowding in semantic neighborhoods: A computational analysis of deep dyslexia.Brain & Cognition,30, 111–114.
Buchanan, L., Kiss, I., &Burgess, C. (2000). Phonological and semantic information in word and nonword reading in a deep dyslexic patient.Brain & Cognition,36, 65–68.
Burgess, C., &Lund, K. (1997). Representing abstract words and emotional connotation in a high-dimensional memory space. In M.G. Shafto & P. Langley (Eds.),Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 61–66). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Burgess, C., &Lund, K. (2000). The dynamics of meaning in memory. In E. Dietrich & A. Markman (Eds.),Cognitive dynamics: Conceptual and representational change in humans and machines (pp. 117–156). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Gibbs, P., &Van Orden, G. (1998). Pathway selection’s utility for control of word recognition.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,24, 1162–1187.
Glosser, G., Friedman, R. B., Grugan, P. K., Lee, J. H., &Grossman, M. (1998). Lexical semantic priming and associative priming in Alzheimer’s disease.Neuorpsychology,12, 218–224.
Grainger, J., &Jacobs, A. M. (1996). Orthographic processing in visual word recognition: A multiple readout model.Psychological Review,103, 518–565.
Hino, Y., &Lupker, S. (1996). Effects of polysemy in lexical decision and naming: An alternative to lexical access accounts.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,22, 1331–1356.
Janczura, G. A., &Nelson, D. L. (1999). Concept accessibility as the determinant of typicality judgements.American Journal of Psychology,11, 1–19.
Landauer, T. K., &Dumais, S. T. (1997). A solution to Plato’s problem: The latent semantic analysis theory of acquisition, induction, and representation of knowledge.Psychological Review,104, 211–240.
Lichacz, F. M., Herdman, C. M., Lefevre, J., &Baird, B. (1999). Polysemy effects in word naming.Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology,53, 189–193.
Luce, P. A., Pisoni, D. B., &Goldinger, S. D. (1990). Similarity neighborhoods of spoken words. In G. T. Altmann (Ed.),Cognitive models of speech processing: Psycholinguistic and computational perspectives (pp. 122–147). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lund, K., &Burgess, C. (1996). Producing high-dimensional semantic spaces from lexical co-occurrence.Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers,28, 203–208.
Lund, K., Burgess, C., &Audet, C. (1996). Dissociating semantic and associative word relationships using high dimensional semantic space. In G. W. Cottrell (Ed.),Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 603–608). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Madden, D. J. (1992). Four to ten milliseconds per year: Age-related slowing of visual word identification.Journal of Gerontology,47, 59–68.
Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (1987). Functional parallelism in spoken word recognition.Cognition,25, 71–102.
Masson, M. E. J. (1995). A distributed memory model of semantic priming.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,21, 3–23.
McClelland, J. L., &Elman, J. L. (1986). The TRACE model of speech perception.Cognitive Psychology,18, 1–86.
McClelland, J. L., &Kawamoto, A. H. (1986). Mechanisms of sentence processing: Assigning roles to constituent. In D. E. Rummelhart, J. L. McClelland, and the PDP Research Group (Eds.),Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition. Vol.2: Psychological and biological models (pp. 272–325). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McNamara, T. P. (1994). Theories of priming.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,20, 507–520.
McRae, K., &Boisvert, S. (1998). Automatic semantic similarity priming.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,24, 558–572.
Moss, H. E., Ostrin, R. K., Tyler, L. K., &Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (1995). Accessing different types of lexical semantic information: Evidence from priming.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,21, 863–883.
MRC Psycholinguistic Database: Machine Usable Dictionary. Version 2.00 [On-line]. Available http://www.psy.uwa.edu.au/MRCData-Base/mrc2.html.
Myerson, J., Ferraro, F. R., Hale, S., &Lima, S. D. (1992). General slowing in semantic priming and word recognition.Psychology & Aging,7, 257–270.
Myerson, J., Hale, S., Chen, J., &Lawrence, B. (1997). General lexical slowing and the semantic priming effect: The roles of age and ability.Acta Psychologica,96, 83–101.
Nelson, D. L., Bennett, D. J., &Leibert, T. W. (1997). One step is not enough: Making better use of association norms to predict cued recall.Memory & Cognition,25, 785–796.
Nelson, D. L., McEvoy, C. L., & Schreiber, T. A. (1994).The University of South Florida word association, rhyme and word fragment norms. Unpublished manuscript.
Nelson, D. L., McKinney, V. M., Gee, N. R., &Janczura, G. A. (1998). Interpreting the influence of implicitly activated memories on recall and recognition.Psychological Review,105, 299–324.
Ober, B. A., Shenaut, G. K., &Reed, B. R. (1995). Assessment of associative relations in Alzheimer’s disease: Evidence for the preservation of semantic memory.Aging & Cognition,2, 254–267.
Peereman, R., &Content, A. (1995). Neighborhood size effects in naming: Lexical activation or sublexical correspondences?Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,21, 409–421.
Pexman, P., &Lupker, S. (1999). Ambiguity and visual word recognition: Can feedback explain both homophone and polysemy effects?Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology,53, 323–334.
Plaut, D. C. (1995). Semantic and associative priming in a distributed attractor network. In J. D. Moore & J. F. Lehman (Eds.),Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 37–42). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Plaut, D. C. (1997). Structure and function in the lexical system: Insights from distributed models of word reading and lexical decision.Language & Cognitive Processes,12, 765–805.
Plaut, D. C., &Shallice, T. (1993). Deep dyslexia: A case study of connectionist neuropsychology.Cognitive Neuropsychology,10, 377–500.
Sears, C. R., Hino, Y., &Lupker, S. J. (1995). Neighborhood size and neighborhood frequency effects in word recognition.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,21, 876–900.
Simpson, G. B. (1984). Lexical ambiguity and its role in models of word recognition.Psychological Bulletin,96, 316–340.
Sommers, M. S., &Danielson, S. M. (1999). Inhibitory processes and spoken word recognition in young and older adults: The interaction of lexical competition and semantic context.Psychology & Aging,14, 458–472.
Spieler, D. H., & Balota, D. A. (1998).Naming latencies for 2820 words [On-line]. Available at http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~balota/naming. html.
Stone, G., Vanhoy, M., &Van Orden, G. (1997). Perception is a twoway street: Feedforward and feedback phonology in visual word recognition.Journal of Memory & Language,36, 337–359.
Westbury, C., &Buchanan, L. (1999). What’s in a word? A sublexical effect in a lexical decision task. In M. Hahn & S. C. Stoness (Eds.),Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (p. 824). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This research was funded by the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Buchanan, L., Westbury, C. & Burgess, C. Characterizing semantic space: Neighborhood effects in word recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 8, 531–544 (2001). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196189
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196189