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Socialness Effects in Lexical-Semantic Processing

Authors :
Veronica Diveica
Emiko J. Muraki
Richard J. Binney
Penny M. Pexman
Source :
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 2024 50(8):1329-1343.
Publication Year :
2024

Abstract

Contemporary theories of semantic representation posit that social experience is an important source of information for deriving meaning. However, there is a lack of behavioral evidence in support of this proposal. The aim of the present work was to test whether words' degree of social relevance, or "socialness", influences lexical-semantic processing. In Study 1, across a series of item-level regression analyses, we found that (a) socialness can facilitate responses in lexical, semantic, and memory tasks, and (b) limited evidence for an interaction of socialness with concreteness. In Studies 2-3, we tested the preregistered hypothesis that social words, compared to nonsocial words, will be associated with faster and more accurate responses during a syntactic classification task. We found that socialness has a facilitatory effect on noun decisions (Study 3), but not verb decisions (Study 2). Overall, our results suggest that the socialness of a word affects lexical-semantic processing but also that this is task-dependent. These findings constitute novel evidence in support of proposals that social information is an important dimension of semantic representation.

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
0278-7393 and 1939-1285
Volume :
50
Issue :
8
Database :
ERIC
Journal :
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
EJ1435985
Document Type :
Journal Articles<br />Reports - Research
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001328