A Spreading-Activation Theory of Semantic Processing

This paper presents a spreading-activation theory of human semantic processing, which can be applied to a wide range of recent experimental results. The theory is based on Quillian's theory of semantic memory search and semantic preparation, or priming. In conjunction with this, several of the miscondeptions concerning Qullian's theory are discussed. A number of additional assumptions are proposed for his theory in order to apply it to recent experiments. The present paper shows how the extended theory can account for results of several production experiments by Loftus, Juola and Atkinson's multiple-category experiment, Conrad's sentence-verification experiments, and several categorization experiments on the effect of semantic relatedness and typicality by Holyoak and Glass, Rips, Shoben, and Smith, and Rosch. The paper also provides a critique of the Smith, Shoben, and Rips model for categorization judgments.