Recognition of spoken words: Semantic effects in lexical access

Until recently most models of word recognition have assumed that semantic effects come into play only after the identification of the word in question. What little evidence exists for early semantic effects in word recognition has relied primarily on priming manipulations using the lexical decision task, and has used visual stimulus presentation. The current study uses auditory stimulus presentation and multiple experimental tasks, and does not use priming. Response latencies for 100 common nouns were found to depend on perceptual dimensions identified by Osgood (1969): Evaluation, Potency, and Activity. In addition, the two-way interactions between these dimensions were significant. All effects were above and beyond the effects of concreteness, word length, frequency, onset phoneme characteristics, stress, and neighborhood density. Results are discussed against evidence from several areas of research suggesting a role of behaviorally important information in perception.