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Individual variability in the semantic processing of English compound words.

ABSTRACT: Semantic transparency effects during compound word recognition provide critical insight into the organization of semantic knowledge and the nature of semantic processing. The past 25 years of psycholinguistic research on compound semantic transparency has produced discrepant effects, leaving the existence and nature of its influence unresolved. In the present study, we examined the influence of semantic transparency and individual reading experience on eye-movement behavior during sentence reading. Eye-movement data were collected from 138 non-college-bound 16- to 26-year-old speakers of English in a sentence-reading task representing a total of 455 different compound words. Measures of individual differences in reading experience were collected from the same participants and consisted of standardized assessments of exposure to printed materials, vocabulary size, and word recognition skill. Statistical analyses revealed facilitatory effects of both Modifier-Compound and Head-Compound transparency throughout the eye-movement record. Moreover, the study reports interactions between Head-Compound transparency and measures of reading experience. Readers with a small amount exposure to printed materials and a limited vocabulary size exhibited slower processing in late eye-movement measures when reading highly transparent compounds relative to opaque compounds. The opposite effect was observed for readers with a relatively large amount of exposure to printed materials and a relatively larger vocabulary size, such that highly transparent compounds facilitated lexical processing. To account for the results, the authors posit a trade-off between 2 cognitive mechanisms, which is modulated by individual reading experience; that is, the benefit of semantic coactivation of closely related concepts, and the cost of discriminating between those concepts. (PsycINFO Database Record

SUBMITTER: Schmidtke D

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5862730 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Individual variability in the semantic processing of English compound words.

Schmidtke Daniel D Van Dyke Julie A JA Kuperman Victor V

Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition 20170921 3

Semantic transparency effects during compound word recognition provide critical insight into the organization of semantic knowledge and the nature of semantic processing. The past 25 years of psycholinguistic research on compound semantic transparency has produced discrepant effects, leaving the existence and nature of its influence unresolved. In the present study, we examined the influence of semantic transparency and individual reading experience on eye-movement behavior during sentence readi ...[more]

PMID: 28933895

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Project description:Semantic processing of visually presented words can be identified both on behavioral and neurophysiological evidence. One of the major discoveries of the last decades is the demonstration that these signatures of semantic processing, initially observed for consciously perceived words, can also be detected for masked words inaccessible to conscious reports. In this context, the distinction between conscious and unconscious verbal semantic processing constitutes a challenging scientific issue. A prominent view considered that while conscious representations are subject to executive control, unconscious ones would operate automatically in a modular way, independent from control and top-down influences. Recent findings challenged this view by revealing that endogenous attention and task-setting can have a strong influence on unconscious processing. However, one of the major arguments supporting the automaticity of unconscious semantic processing still stands, stemming from a seminal observation reported by Marcel in 1980 about polysemous words. In the present study we reexamined this evidence. We present a combination of behavioral and event-related-potentials (ERPs) results that refute this view by showing that the current conscious semantic context has a major and similar influence on the semantic processing of both visible and masked polysemous words. In a classical lexical decision task, a polysemous word was preceded by a word which defined the current semantic context. Crucially, this context was associated with only one of the two meanings of the polysemous word, and was followed by a word/pseudo-word target. Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence of semantic priming of target words by masked polysemous words was strongly dependent on the conscious context. Moreover, we describe a new type of influence related to the response-code used to answer for target words in the lexical decision task: unconscious semantic priming constrained by the conscious context was present both in behavior and ERPs exclusively when right-handed subjects were instructed to respond to words with their right hand. The strong and respective influences of conscious context and response-code on semantic processing of masked polysemous words demonstrate that unconscious verbal semantic representations are not automatic.

Dataset Information

Individual variability in the semantic processing of English compound words.

Publications

Individual variability in the semantic processing of English compound words.

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