TY - JOUR

T1 - Socialness Effects in Lexical-Semantic Processing

AU - Diveica, Veronica

AU - Muraki, Emiko J.

AU - Binney, Richard J.

AU - Pexman, Penny M.

PY - 2024/3/21

Y1 - 2024/3/21

N2 - Contemporary theories of semantic representation posit that social experience is an important source of information for deriving meaning. However, there is a lack of behavioural evidence in support of this proposal. The aim of the present work was to test whether words’ degree of social relevance, or socialness, influences lexical-semantic processing. In Study 1, across a series of item-level regression analyses, we found (1) that socialness can facilitate responses in lexical, semantic and memory tasks, and (2) limited evidence for an interaction of socialness with concreteness. In Studies 2-3, we tested the pre-registered hypothesis that social words, compared to non-social words, will be associated with faster and more accurate responses during a syntactic classification task. We found that socialness has a facilitatory effect on noun decisions (Study 3), but not verb decisions (Study 2). Overall, our results suggest that the socialness of a word affects lexical-semantic processing but also that this is task-dependent. These findings constitute novel evidence in support of proposals that social information is an important dimension of semantic representation.

AB - Contemporary theories of semantic representation posit that social experience is an important source of information for deriving meaning. However, there is a lack of behavioural evidence in support of this proposal. The aim of the present work was to test whether words’ degree of social relevance, or socialness, influences lexical-semantic processing. In Study 1, across a series of item-level regression analyses, we found (1) that socialness can facilitate responses in lexical, semantic and memory tasks, and (2) limited evidence for an interaction of socialness with concreteness. In Studies 2-3, we tested the pre-registered hypothesis that social words, compared to non-social words, will be associated with faster and more accurate responses during a syntactic classification task. We found that socialness has a facilitatory effect on noun decisions (Study 3), but not verb decisions (Study 2). Overall, our results suggest that the socialness of a word affects lexical-semantic processing but also that this is task-dependent. These findings constitute novel evidence in support of proposals that social information is an important dimension of semantic representation.

KW - semantic memory

KW - social semantics

KW - grounded cognition

KW - multiple representations

KW - abstract concepts

U2 - 10.1037/xlm0001328

DO - 10.1037/xlm0001328

M3 - Article

JO - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

JF - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

SN - 0278-7393

ER -