The impact of semantic relatedness on speaking durations in sentences

A fundamental question in the study of language production is how the organization of words and concepts in semantic memory affect the recall and planning of these words and concepts. Semantic interference effects have been found throughout a variety of language production tasks. At the same time, facilitatory priming effects in language suggest that there are cases where semantic relatedness between entities may result in facilitation for speakers. One possible explanation is that the source of relatedness, ie whether entities are distributionally similar or co-occurring, may both production but in different ways, resulting in either facilitation or interference depending on the specific type of relatedness. The present study uses a picture description sentence production task to gain more insight into how different sources of semantic relatedness may impact language production. We find evidence for facilitation regardless of the source of semantic relatedness such that speaking durations were shorter when speakers produced sentences containing semantically related entities. These findings suggest that semantic relatedness can impact language production such that semantically related entities “prime” each other and facilitate recall and planning. We discuss how aspects of the experimental task as well as the operationalization of different types of semantic relatedness may affect the pattern results observed here, or that may arise in future studies.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Erens, Jacqueline Annette

Contributors dc:contributor

• Montag, Jessica L
• Federmeier, Kara D

• Language Production
• Semantic Interference
• Semantic Relatedness
• Co-occurrence
• Distributional Similarity

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Jacqueline Erens

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/117845

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F117845