The Time Course of Activation of Semantic Information during Spoken Word Recognition

Abstract

We investigated the time course of activation of the mental representations of word meanings in a series of three cross-modal priming experiments. In Experiment 1, we showed a significant priming effect for semantically related targets presented at the “isolation point” of the prime word, confirming earlier evidence for the activation of multiple word meanings before the point at which a word can be recognised. The use of non-associated prime-target materials ruled out the possibility that this could be an artifact of form-based associative priming. Experiment 2 demonstrated that certain semantic properties are made available more rapidly than others in the duration of a spoken word and, specifically, that for words referring to man-made objects, information about their function and design is activated more quickly than information about their physical form. However, this experiment did not reveal any limit on the activation of a word's meaning as a function of the number of simultaneously activated competitor candidates. Finally, Experiment 3 showed that the results of the first two experiments could not be explained in terms of backwards priming from target to prime. We interpret the data with respect to both localist and distributed implementations of the cohort model.