Semantic effects in lexical access: Evidence from single-word naming

Cognitive psychologists have not devoted much attention to semantic and emotional effects early in word recognition, assuming instead that such effects are primarily post-perceptual. Some evidence of such early effects does exist, but it relies exclusively on a less-than-ideal experimental task, the lexical decision task. In the current study, participants heard words over headphones and repeated them into a microphone as quickly as possible (single-word naming). The Danger and Usefulness of word referents were significantly related to naming times, independent of effects such as word length, familiarity, onset characteristics, stress, neighbourhood density, and concreteness. Results are discussed in terms of the adaptive benefit of making quick classifications along these dimensions, and against a backdrop of evidence from several widely divergent areas of research.