Semantic satiation affects category membership decision time but not lexical priming

Abstract

Experiments 1 and 2 examined the effects of semantic satiation on category membership decision latency. Subjects overtly repeated the name of a category either 3 or 30 times, and then decided whether or not a target exemplar was a member of the repeated category. Experiment 1 obtained some evidence that member decisions are slower and nonmember decisions are faster following 30 repetitions, but only the interaction was reliable. Experiment 2 confirmed only that member decisions are slower following satiation of the category name. The results support the hypothesis that prolonged repetition of a word reduces the availability of semantic information related to that word. Experiment 3 showed that the magnitude of priming in the lexical decision task is unaffected by satiation of the prime. Several general approaches to understanding semantic satiation are discussed. The most parsimonious account assumes that satiation affects the links or pathways connecting concepts in the satiated category. The net effect is to decrease the rate of search and associative spread of activation in conceptual structures.Semantic satiation refers to the apparent loss or attenuation of the meaning of a word as a result of massed overt repetition. The reader may quickly experience this phenomenon by repeating (probably) any word for about 20-30 sec. After the first paper on semantic satiation appeared (Severance & Washburn, 1907), a substantial literature developed in the effort to demonstrate the semantic character of the effect of satiation. At the time of Esposito and Pelton's (1971) comprehensive review of the semantic satiation literature, the measurement of the effect of satiation included subjective report, the commonality and number of associates generated to the satiated word, and synonym judgment and associate retrieval time. According to Esposito and Pelton, this literature provides inconsistent support for the semantic satiation hypothesis and results that are open to alternative explanation.More recently, Neely (l977a) reported an experiment that applied the semantic priming paradigm to the semantic satiation phenomenon. The finding that lexical (wordnonword) decisions are faster when a target word is preceded by a semantically related prime word than when it is preceded by a neutral or semantically unrelated prime (Antos, 1979;Neely, 1977b) suggests that this task may provide a good demonstration of semantic satiation. Specifically, Neely argued that the semantic satiation hypothThis research was supported by a NSERC Canada grant held by Raymond Klein. Thanks are extended to Raymond Klein for support and extensive comments on earlier versions of this paper. Thanks are also extended to James Neely and David Balota for their valuable comments, and to

The Effect of Target Repetition on Semantic Priming in a Three-Target RSVP Task

“…These results were inconsistent with previous studies demonstrating a loss of meaning of repeated words (e.g., Smith, 1984;Smith & Klein, 1990;Wertheimer & Gillis, 1958) and the elimination of semantic priming effects due to extensive prime repetition (e.g., Neely et al, 1998;Pitzer & Dagenbach, 2001). While these results indicate that priming is unaffected by target repetition at response, further research is required to examine the impact of target repetition during the actual RSVP task.…”

“…Studies have reported the subjective loss of meaning of a word (semantic satiation) through prolonged exposure to and repetition of a word (e.g., Smith, 1984;Smith & Klein, 1990;Wertheimer & Gillis, 1958). For example, Smith (1984) used a category membership task and required participants pronounced the category name (e.g., fruit) 3 or 30 times as it appeared on the computer screen. After the final repetition, a target word (that was either related or unrelated to the category name e.g., apple or hawk) appeared on the screen.…”

More is not always better: paradoxical effects of repetition on semantic accessibility

“…Critically, member decisions were actually slower following 30 repetitions of the category than after only 3 (see also Balota &Black, 1997, andSmith &Klein, 1990). Using similar methods, satiation effects have been observed with faces as the repeated stimuli (Lewis & Ellis, 2000), suggesting that this phenomenon may be a general consequence of massive repetition, at least for measures of accessibility taken immediately after repetition.…”

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“…It is more likely that worrisome thinking is the immediate cognitive avoidance response to such images when they do occur. The demonstrated suppressive effects of worry on somatic anxiety could also be due to the fact that worry uses up significant amounts of attentional resource (Mathews, 1990), is difficult to shift away from (Parkinson & Rachman, 1981), insulates its thoughts from affective meaning through the semantic satiation inherent in its repetitive verbal activity (Smith, 1984), and creates less mismatch between information expected and • information received (Gray, 1982).…”