Describe how lexical decision tasks have been used to study semantic memory.

Question 1

Describe how lexical decision tasks have been used to study semantic memory.

Answer 1

The lexical decision task (LDT) is a procedure used in many psychology and psycholinguistics experiments.

The basic procedure involves measuring how quickly people classify stimuli as words or nonwords.

Lexical decision tasks are used to test semantic memory networks.

These tasks can help determine if a word is an actual word or a non-word. They can also test if two concepts are related, such as doctor → nurse or doctor → bread.

Question 2

What basic mechanism is thought to underlie semantic priming effects?

Answer 2

Semantic priming indicates that activation passes between nodes (Nodes are concepts such as red, candy, bird, president, etc.)

Question 3

Describe how Neely’s research provides support for the roles of automatic spreading activation and limited capacity attention in semantic retrieval.

Answer 3

Neely’s research (expected vs. unexpected relations of words/concepts).

By linking unrelated concepts (e.g. parts of a building with body parts), Neely was able to measure how well people can link unrelated concepts to each other, and how related concepts (e.g. window → door) can interfere with the newly learned links (e.g. door → arm).

Also, Neely showed that attention plays a role in linking unrelated concepts, while minimal attention is required for automatic spreading of previously related concepts.