Semantic effects in single-word naming

Three experiments demonstrated that, for lower frequency words, reading aloud is affected not only by spelling-sound typicality but also by a semantic variable, imageability. Participants were slower and more error prone when naming exception words with abstract meanings (e.g., scarce) than when nam...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition Vol. 21; no. 5; p. 1140
Main Authors Strain, E, Patterson, K, Seidenberg, M S
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States 01.09.1995
Subjects
Adult
Attention
Female
Humans
Imagination
Male
Middle Aged
Phonetics
Psycholinguistics
Reaction Time
Reading
Reference Values
Semantics
Verbal Learning
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Summary:Three experiments demonstrated that, for lower frequency words, reading aloud is affected not only by spelling-sound typicality but also by a semantic variable, imageability. Participants were slower and more error prone when naming exception words with abstract meanings (e.g., scarce) than when naming either abstract regular words (e.g., scribe) or imageable exception words (e.g., soot). It is proposed that semantic representations of words have the largest impact on translating orthography to phonology when this translation process is slow or noisy (i.e., for low-frequency exceptions) and that words with rich semantic representations (i.e., high-imageability words) are most likely to benefit from this interaction.
ISSN:0278-7393
1939-1285
DOI:10.1037/0278-7393.21.5.1140