The Effect Of Word Sociality On Word Recognition

This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@WayneState. It has been accepted for inclusion in Wayne State University Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@WayneState. Approved by: _____________________________________ Advisor Date _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ DEDICATION To my family. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project owes a great deal to Lee Wurm's studies into semantic effects in spoken word recognition, as well as his patient guidance and instruction throughout my graduate school training. I am also grateful to my committee members, Hsieh, for their invaluable comments at the proposal stage of this project. I also thank my family and friends for their support. Figure 1: The effects of 10 lexico-semantic variables on visual lexical decision reaction time (MS)…………………………………………………………………….56 Figure 2: The effects of 10 lexico-semantic variables on visual lexical decision accuracy (%)...57 Figure 3: The effects of 10 lexico-semantic variables on auditory lexical decision reaction time (MS)…………………………………………………………………….58 Figure 4: The effects of 10 lexico-semantic variables on auditory lexical decision accuracy (%) vi 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Overview The goal of this study was to investigate a new type of semantic influence in word recognition – specifically, whether there is a behavioral difference in the recognition of spoken social words when compared to non-social words, in speed of recognition and accuracy. shown that some semantic characteristics of words can influence word recognition. For example, concreteness and imageability have been shown to influence response times in tasks considered to be measures of online lexical retrieval (for a review see Tyler, Moss, Galpin, & Voice, 2002). The presence of semantic effects in word recognition supports the notion that recognition is an interactive process in which higher level cognition can influence lower level perception. The current study is an investigation into a new semantic effect in word recognition – social bias – and whether word recognition shows some dependency upon the sociality of a word's referent, with the goal of uncovering elements of semantic structure in the mental lexicon. By social bias, I mean the relevance of a word's referent in a social context. I refer to this concept as sociality – higher sociality means more relevance in a social context. The goal of the study was to investigate whether sociality affects visual and auditory word recognition. The two most studied semantic variables in word recognition research are concreteness and imageability. Concreteness is highly correlated with imageability and both are often …