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Naming a picture is more difficult in the context of a taxonomically-related picture. Disagreement exists on whether non-taxonomic relations, e.g., associations, have similar or different effects on picture naming. Past work has reported facilitation, interference and null results but with inconsistent methodologies. We paired the same target word (e.g., cow) with unrelated (pen), taxonomically-related (bear), and associatively-related (milk) items in different blocks, as participants repeatedly named one of the two pictures in randomized order. Significant interference was uncovered for the same target item in the taxonomic vs. unrelated and associative blocks. There was no robust evidence of interference in the associative blocks. If anything, evidence suggested that associatively-related items marginally facilitated production. This finding suggests that taxonomic and associative relations have different effects on picture naming and has implications for theoretical models of lexical selection and, more generally, for the computations involved in mapping semantic features to lexical items.
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The Role of Co‐Occurrence Statistics in Developing Semantic Knowledge
Abstract The organization of our knowledge about the world into an interconnected network of concepts linked by relations profoundly impacts many facets of cognition, including attention, memory retrieval, reasoning, and learning. It is therefore crucial to understand how organized semantic representations are acquired. The present experiment investigated the contributions of readily observable environmental statistical regularities to semantic organization in childhood. Specifically, we investigated whether co‐occurrence regularities with which entities or their labels more reliably occur together than with others (a) contribute to relations between concepts independently and (b) contribute to relations between concepts belonging to the same taxonomic category. Using child‐directed speech corpora to estimate reliable co‐occurrences between labels for familiar items, we constructed triads consisting of a target, a related distractor, and an unrelated distractor in which targets and related distractors consistently co‐occurred (e.g., sock‐foot), belonged to the same taxonomic category (e.g., sock‐coat), or both (e.g., sock‐shoe). We used an implicit, eye‐gaze measure of relations between concepts based on the degree to which children (N = 72, age 4–7 years) looked at related versus unrelated distractors when asked to look for a target. The results indicated that co‐occurrence both independently contributes to relations between concepts and contributes to relations between concepts belonging to the same taxonomic category. These findings suggest that sensitivity to the regularity with which different entities co‐occur in children's environments shapes the organization of semantic knowledge during development. Implications for theoretical accounts and empirical investigations of semantic organization are discussed.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1918259
- PAR ID:
- 10245442
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Cognitive Science
- Volume:
- 44
- Issue:
- 9
- ISSN:
- 0364-0213
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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