Back to Search
Start Over
Socialness Effects in Lexical-Semantic Processing
- 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