Novel word integration in the mental lexicon: Evidence from unmasked and masked semantic priming

Abstract

We sought to establish whether novel words can become integrated into existing semantic networks by teaching participants new meaningful words and then using these new words as primes in two semantic priming experiments, in which participants carried out a lexical decision task to familiar words. Importantly, at no point in training did the novel words co-occur with the familiar words that served as targets in the primed lexical decision task, allowing us to evaluate semantic priming in the absence of direct association. We found that familiar words were primed by the newly related novel words, both when the novel word prime was unmasked (Experiment 1) and when it was masked (Experiment 2), suggesting that the new words had been integrated into semantic memory. Furthermore, this integration was strongest after a 1-week delay and was independent of explicit recall of the novel word meanings: Forgetting of meanings did not attenuate priming. We argue that even after brief training, newly learned words become an integrated part of the adult mental lexicon rather than being episodically represented separately from the lexicon.

Keywords:

• Word learning
• Semantic priming
• Memory consolidation

Acknowledgments

Jakke Tamminen was supported by an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) doctoral studentship, an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship (PTA-026–27–2540), and ESRC grant RES-062-23-2268. Gareth Gaskell was supported by an ESRC fellowship (RES-063-27-0061) and a Leverhulme Trust grant (F/00 224/AO). Jakke Tamminen is now at the Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK.

Notes

¹ Only 68 of these were trained, the remaining 34 were untrained and were used in a shadowing task not reported in this paper. This task always took place after the priming task and therefore could not have affected the data reported in the present paper. All 102 nonwords were used as trained novel words across all the participants, as the nonwords were rotated through the trained/untrained conditions.

² There is currently little consensus among users of mixed-effects models in the field of psycholinguistics on the use of random slopes. Here we adopted the practice of including them only when they significantly improve the fit of the model, as recommended by Baayen et al. (2008), for example. However, in those cases in which random slopes did not significantly improve the fit of the model, we have checked that the effects we report being significant remain so even in the presence of subject-specific random slopes for the effect in question (unless including the random slope prevented the model from converging).

³ We have also analysed the number of features recalled by participants; this analysis provided identical results to the analysis based on object recall reported here in both experiments.

⁴ We thank Jim Neely for suggesting this analysis.