The present study examined the general hypothesis that, as for nouns, stable representations of semantic knowledge relative to situations expressed by verbs are available and accessible in long term memory in normal people. Regular associations between verbs and past tenses in French adults allowed to abstract two superordinate semantic features in the representation of verb meaning: durativity...

The current study examines how non-native speakers process deverbal nouns of Arabic. Unlike Indo-European languages, the word-formation in Arabic occurs a discontinuous manner. root morpheme (carrying core semantic information) interlocks word pattern (which holds phonological and morpho-syntactic information). Research on shows that native decompose derived inflected (deverbal verbs) complex w...

Introduction. Evidence is accumulating that suggests that semantic networks are abnormal in schizophrenia. Methods. To investigate this further, we examined priming in 42 schizophrenics and 28 normal controls on a lexical decision task involving three different prime-target conditions all at 700ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA): directly semantically related, indirectly semantically related, a...

Related words/concepts prime one another, but the notion of semantic relatedness is notoriously difficult to pin down and may be due to linguistic association (reflecting the likelihood of two words appearing in shared/similar contexts) and/or true semantic overlap (reflecting how similar two words are in conceptual representation). In the present work, we propose a novel measure of semantic re...

This study investigated the impact of divided attention on masked priming. In a dual-task setting, two tasks had to be carried out in close temporal succession: a tone discrimination task and a masked priming task. The order of the tasks was varied between experiments, and attention was always allocated to the first task-that is, the first task was prioritized. The priming task was the second (...

Previous research has shown that word-to-picture matching for targets that cannot be named at pre-test results in improved naming relative to untreated control items for people with aphasia. This paper replicates and extends this finding and investigates its source. Is the effect a result of priming of semantic representations, or of post-semantic mechanisms in word retrieval? The first experim...

A method used widely to study the first 250 ms of visual word recognition is masked priming: These studies have yielded a rich set of data concerning the processes involved in recognizing letters and words. In these studies, there is an implicit assumption that the early processes in word recognition tapped by masked priming are automatic, and masked priming effects should therefore be invarian...

The neural substrates responsible for semantic dysfunction during the early stages of AD have yet to be clearly identified. After a brief overview of the literature on normal and pathological semantic memory, we describe a new approach, designed to provide fresh insights into semantic deficits in AD. We mapped the correlations between resting-state brain glucose utilisation measured by FDG-PET ...

Connectionist models of the mapping from orthography or phonology to random binary semantic vectors allow the simulation of lexical decision with reaction times that show patterns of semantic and associative priming similar to those found experimentally with human subjects. The co-occurrence statistics of words in large corpora allow the generation of vectors whose distribution correlates with ...