Many English words have more than
one meaning. We often need to quickly decide which meaning is correct in the
language that we hear or read. The series of studies reported in this paper
examined whether our ability to quickly and accurately retrieve a word is shaped
by experience. The studies used the ‘word-meaning priming’ paradigm to assess
meaning preference. In this task, participants would hear prime sentences that
included a word with many possible meanings (e.g., FAN – a cooling instrument
or someone that cheers on a favourite past time) however, the intended meaning
of the word was always made clear in the sentence (e.g., The star was cheered
loudly by the FANS). After this, the participant completed a word association
task where they saw a word and were asked to give a word with a related
meaning. For words that were primed like ‘FAN’, the participants would be more
likely to say a word related to the meaning from the prime sentence if that
meaning was made more accessible by the priming.
Experiments 1 and 2 examined
short-term priming effects. In experiment 1, after hearing the prime paragraphs
read during a radio program, participants completed the word association task
online. Results revealed an effect of time and age. Priming was stronger when
the experiment was completed within the first day (and rapidly delayed within
the first hour) and younger participants were more readily primed. The purpose
of Experiment 2 was to systematically compare the time course of priming (i.e.,
1 min, 20 min, and 40 min) in a controlled setting. Results replicated
Experiment 1 in that priming was strongest at the 1 minute delay and reduced by
the 20th and 40th minute (which didn’t differ). Together,
these results confirm that relatively recent experience can influence meaning
selection.
Long-term priming effects were
explored in Experiment 3 and 4. The focus was on how rowers—due to their rowing
experience—might easily access rowing-specific meanings for relatively common
words (e.g., “square” meaning the position of the oar). Experiment 3 found
stronger effects for rowers who had rowed for a long time and by those who
started at a young age. Experiment 4 found that rowing-related meaning was
influenced by the most recent rowing experience; increase in rowing responses
was particularly driven by participants who had rowed on the same day.
These experiments show that your
recent experience influence word learning. The findings could suggest that
activating background knowledge of a specific meaning prior to task completion
could facilitate access to the needed meaning during the task. Furthermore, the
rapid decay of priming effects might mean that repeated exposure within a short
time window is necessary to maintain the accessibility of word meaning.
Blogger: Theresa Pham is a student in the combined MClSc/PhD program
working under the supervision of Dr. Lisa Archibald. Theresa’s work examines
the learning of phonological (speech sound) and semantic (meaning) aspects of
words.
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