Semantic richness effects in isolated spoken word recognition: Evidence from massive auditory lexical decision.

Abstract

While known to influence visual lexical processing, the semantic information we associate with words has recently been found to influence auditory lexical processing as well. The present work explored the influence of semantic richness in auditory lexical decision. Study 1 recreated an experiment investigating semantic richness effects in concrete nouns (Goh et al., 2016). In Study 2, we expanded the stimulus set from 442 to 8,626 items, exploring the robustness of effects observed in Study 1 against a larger data set with increased diversity in both word class and other characteristics of interest. We also utilized generalized additive mixed models to investigate potential nonlinear effects. Results indicate that semantic richness effects become more nuanced and detectable when a wider set of items belonging to different parts of speech is examined. Findings are discussed in the context of models of spoken word recognition.

Investigating the Extent to which Distributional Semantic Models Capture a Broad Range of Semantic Relations

“…Isolated spoken word recognition continues to be a major area of research, with the development of large performance databases (Goh, Yap, & Chee, 2020), and work focused on isolated spoken words is critical in current research on language development and disorders (Apfelbaum, Goodwin, Blomquist, & McMurray, 2023; Giovannone & Theodore, 2021; McMurray, Apfelbaum, & Tomblin, 2022), language and cognitive decline in aging (Nitsan, Banai, & Ben‐David, 2022), and unlocking the organization of bilingual lexical knowledge and processing (Desroches, Friesen, Teles, Korade, & Forest, 2022). While many questions remain to be answered about form recognition, there is also active research on semantic processing in isolated words (Nenadić, Podlubny, Schmidtke, Kelley, & Tucker, 2022). Similar questions are addressed in the domain of isolated visual word recognition, including basic processes of form recognition (Wang et al., 2021) and how word meaning influences those processes (Connell & Lynott, 2014; Pexman, Heard, Lloyd, & Yap, 2017), how word meaning is represented in the human brain (Fernandino, Tong, Conant, Humphries, & Binder, 2022; Poeppel & Idsardi, 2022), and how words are related to one another, such as research on associative relations (De Deyne, Navarro, Perfors, Brysbaert, & Storms, 2019), and semantic priming (Hutchison et al., 2013).…”

Semantic variables and their application in L2 research

“…Though not an L2 study, Nenadić et al (2022) exemplifies the effective use of semantic network variables by exploring the effect multiple semantic measures have on L1 English listening comprehension. The researchers conducted two auditory lexical decision tasks.…”

“…Semantic diversity only predicted participant performance for adjectives. Nenadić et al (2022) employed three methodological design approaches which should be utilized in future L2 semantic research. First, the researchers employ multiple semantic variables in their analyses.…”