Activating meaning in time: The role of imageability and form-class

Abstract

A number of studies have shown that the meanings of spoken words are activated early in processing, well before all of the word has been heard. However, these studies have not explicitly taken into account a number of variables which are known to affect word recognition processes. Two important variables are a word's imageability and its form-class. In the experiments reported here we use a cross-modal priming task to investigate the role that these variables play on the time-course with which word meanings are activated. We present visual target words for lexical decision at different points through the duration of spoken primes. In one study the spoken primes were either abstract or concrete words, and in a second they were either nouns or verbs. We found significant priming for all types of words early in the duration of a spoken prime. We discuss these results in terms of various models of semantic activation, concluding that distributed models provide the best fit to the data.