Semantic congruity in symbolic comparisons: Salience,expectancy, and associative priming

An expectancy interpretation of semantic congruity effects suggests that in symbolic comparisons involving the typical comparative-then-stimuli paradigm, the comparative acts as a cue in priming memory for related stimuli. A recent study by Holyoak and Mah (1981) presented evidence purported to disconfirm this hypothesis insofar as a congruity effect also was obtained when the stimuli preceded the comparative. The present study showed the stimulicomparative effect to be a consequence of the pairing of stimuli with particularly salient comparatives such that the former could serve the cuing function. This finding is consistent with the expectancy hypothesis in emphasizing the role of a flexible encoding process but inconsistent with the view that only comparatives can create expectancies in symbolic comparisons.     

Semantic congruity in symbolic comparisons: Evidence against an expectancy hypothesis

A previously proposed expectancy hypothesis predicts that the semantic congruity effect typically observed in symbolic comparison tasks will be eliminated when the items to be compared are presented prior to the comparative. Previous studies testing this hypothesis have been inconclusive. The present experiments demonstrate that a semantic congruity effect can be obtained when the comparative follows the pair after a 1-sec (Experiment 1) or 4-sec (Experiment 2) delay. Lexical markedness effects were also obtained. The key to producing a “comparative-after” congruity effect is to intermix questions about several different dimensions, so that when the pair is presented, subjects will be unable to anticipate the question. The results disconfirm the expectancy hypothesis.     

Semantic congruity and expectancy as separate processes

In two experiments, we investigated the role of expectancy in producing congruity effects in comparative judgment. In Experiment 1, instructions to choose the larger or smaller term either preceded pairs for comparative judgment or preceded individual words for lexical decision. If expectancy in interpreting the comparative judgment terms accounts for the congruity effect, the lexical decision task also should show a congruity effect. However, there were large congruity effects in comparative judgment but not in lexical decision. In this experiment, we used an infiniteset design to make sure that semantic information was needed on comparative judgment trials. In Experiment 2, comparative judgment pairs were preceded by a prime word that either was or was not a category label for the terms in the pairs. There were both congruity and priming effects, with no interaction between the two. This result implies that expectancy and the semanticcongruity effect come from separate processes.     

Linguistic marking,strategy, and affect in syllogistic reasoning

It has repeatedly been shown that three-term-series problems with unmarked comparatives (e.g., taller, higher) are solved more quickly than otherwise identical problems using their marked opposites (e.g., shorter, lower). Clark's principle of lexical marking accounts for these results in terms of a simpler semantic featural coding of the unmarked comparative with respect to its marked counterpart. Huttenlocher's theory of spatial imagery accounts for these same results via the subjects' mental ordering of the three terms as instructed by the problem statements. The present research demonstrated that while the lower latency of the unmarked adjective is a reliable effect, congruent ordering strategies are necessary for significant results. Subjects who order terms from unmarked to marked produce significant results for Clark's principle of lexical marking. Those who order terms in opposite direction do not. Further, it is shown that the choice of direction of ordering is itself significantly influenced by the affective value of the adjectives in context and to the individual subject.This research is based on a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the doctoral degree to the University of Illinois.     

Congruity and the perceptual comparison task

The effects of congruity between comparatives and the relative magnitudes of to-be-compared stimuli were investigated in six perceptual comparison experiments. Experiments 1-5 failed to obtain congruity effects in purely perceptual tasks even when subjects had extensive practice with a relatively small stimulus set. Experiment 6 obtained a congruity effect with perceptual stimuli but only when the stimuli were described as representing real-world objects. All of the results indicated that congruity effects occur only in tasks that include major symbolic or memorial components; a review of the perceptual comparison literature reveals consistent support for this position. These findings are discussed in terms of expectancy and semantic coding interpretations of the congruity effect.     

A model of response time effects in symbolic comparison

A cognitive process model is developed that predicts the 3 major symbolic comparison response time effects (distance, end, and semantic congruity) found in the results of the linear syllogistic reasoning task. The model includes a simple connectionist learning component and dual evidence accumulation decision-making components. It assumes that responses can be based either on information concerning the positional difference between the presented stimulus items or on information concerning the endpoint status of each of these items. The model provides an excellent quantitative account of the mean correct response times obtained from 16 participants who performed paired comparisons of 6 ordered symbolic stimuli (3-letter names).     

Effects of stimulus and contextual information on the lexical decision process

Two experiments were conducted to investigate context effects on the lexical decision process. In both experiments, observers classified letter strings as words or nonwords following the presentation of context in the form of an incomplete sentence. In Experiment 1, the predictability of congruous word stimuli and their frequency of occurrence in printed English were varied. These two factors had independent and additive effects on decision latencies. Stimulus quality, word frequency, and semantic congruity (i.e., congruous vs. incongruous) between the context and the stimulus were varied in Experiment 2. The effects of semantic congruity and word frequency on decision latencies combined additively, as did the effects of semantic congruity and stimulus quality. Two complementary mechanisms were proposed within the framework of a modified version of Becker’s verification model to account for the differential effects of single-word and sentence context priming on the lexical decision process.     

Semantic congruity effects and theories of the comparison process.

Two experiments requiring comparisons of point locations on the line demonstrate that the magnitude of the response-time-based congruity effect parallels the form of the macro and the micro speed-accuracy trade-off function. This is predicted from the evidence accrual class of theories but is contrary to either the propositionally based semantic coding theory or the expectancy view. Very large accuracy-based congruity effects with comparisons of point locations in the plane are evident. Congruity effects arise because the duration of each evidence accrual is increased and the quality of the information is reduced as the distance of the stimulus representations from the instruction-activated reference point increases. This evidence accrual view is extended to account for the properties of perceptual and symbolic comparisons.     

Semantic congruity and expectancy in symbolic judgments

These experiments assess the degree to which the semantic-congruity effect in comparative judgment can be explained by such expectancy effects as priming, perceptual "set," or strategies used in the task. The first experiment mixed a lexical-decision task with the comparative-judgment task and showed that neither automatic semantic priming nor deliberate preparation can account for the congruity effect. Experiments 2-4 assessed expectancy effects in a different way by presenting the instructions for comparative judgment either before or after the pair to be judged. These experiments included, among other things, a number of safeguards against artifacts in this paradigm. In these three experiments the congruity effect was obtained with both orders of stimuli and instructions, contrary to the prediction of an expectancy hypothesis. The results indicate that when stimuli are not degraded. The semantic-congruity effect depends largely on the relation between the stimuli and the instructions and only to a small degree, if at all, on expectancy.     

The locus and nature of semantic congruity in symbolic comparison: Evidence from the Stroop effect

Pictures of animals with names of animals printed within the pictures were presented for comparative judgments of size based on either the pictures or the names. The picture-word compounds were compared faster with picture than with word as the relevant dimension. The comparisons of pictures were free of interference from the irrelevant names, but the comparisons of names suffered considerable Stroop interference from the irrelevant pictures. Large effects of semantic congruity characterized the comparisons of both pictures and words. Stroop congruity and semantic congruity did not interact even for comparison of words in which both were present, leading instead to additive effects. The results support theories that (1) place semantic congruity in the decision stage and (2) minimize the role of semantic processing as the basis of the semantic congruity effect.     

Lexical and conceptual factors in the naming of relations

Recent models of language production distinguish three main stages, the generation of a preverbal (or conceptual) message level representation, the stage of linguistic formulation processes (which access lexical items and generate the syntactic frames in which these items are inserted), and the stage of articulation. This means that at least two sources of difficulty in producing a lexical item must be distinguished. First, the difficulty can be due to properties of the message representation. So, for example, several concepts may compete for expression. Second, a given lexical item might be more difficult to access than another item because of differences in the complexity of the processes translating from conceptual to lexical representations. The present study presents evidence for these two sources of difficulty in producing lexical items for the domain of semantically unmarked versus marked dimensional adjectives (e.g., big versus small). The first set of experiments establishes an effect of semantic markedness in language production which is due to a difference in the difficulty of accessing unmarked versus marked lexical items. The second set of experiments shows that competition between concepts for expression can lead to incorrect selection of an (unintended) lexical item (as reflected in certain types of speech errors), or to a higher processing load for producing the correct (intended) lexical item. Together, these experiments support the distinction between a preverbal conceptual and a lexical level of representation in language production, and show that both levels contribute to the relative difficulty of producing lexical items.     

Syntax in pictures

It was hypothesised that pictures drawn to represent active and passive sentences would reflect this syntactic difference. Specifically, it was predicted that the reversal of the order in which the logical subject (LS) and the logical object (LO) occur in the change from active to passive form of sentence will affect the order in which they occur in their pictorial representations. A significant directional preference was found for placing the LO to the left of the LS in the pictorial representations of passive but not active sentences. This was discussed in terms of the marked status of the passive in relation to the active. In the case of sentences differing only in lexical marking there was no asymmetric directionality effect corresponding to that found for actives and passives. A significant tendency to match the surface order of the sentences in the pictures was found for both lexically marked and unmarked sentences. The possibility that other spatial or physical dimensions might be used to express syntactic and semantic factors in the pictorial representation of sentences is considered.     

Isolating the effects of symbolic distance,and semantic congruity in comparative judgments: An additive-factors analysis

The time needed to compare two symbols increases as the cognitive distance between them on the relevant dimension increases (symbolic distance effect). Furthermore, when subjects are told to choose either the larger or the smaller of two stimuli, the response time is shorter if the instruction is congruent with the overall size of the stimuli (semantic congruity effect). Three experiments were conducted to determine the locus of these effects in terms of a sequence of processing stages. The developmental aspects of these effects were also evaluated, as the subjects were from kindergarten, first grade, third grade, fifth grade, and college. By varying the visual quality of the stimulus in each experiment, it was determined that the distance effect resides in a comparison stage, whereas the congruity effect is an encoding phenomenon. Both distance and congruity effects were present at all grade levels, but they decreased in magnitude as grade increased. The results were interpreted relative to recent models of comparative judgments.     

Semantic congruity effects in perceptual comparisons

Semantic congruity effects occur when, as in Experiment 1, for example, the time to select the shorter of two relatively short lines is faster than the time to select the longer; conversely, selection of the longer of two relatively long lines is faster than selection of the shorter. Semantic congruity effects are also demonstrated in experiments requiring comparisons of the heaviness of weights (Experiment 2) and horizontal extent (Experiment 3). In Experiment 1, the magnitude of the semantic congruity effect was larger under conditions emphasizing accuracy rather than speed and when the comparison was difficult. In fact, when comparisons were errorless, the effect was minimal (20 msec), thereby replicating previous failures to obtain the effect with supraliminal perceptual comparisons (Banks, Mermelstein, & Yu, 1982; Marschark & Paivio, 1981; Petrusic & Baranski, 1988a). In confirmation of Henmon's (1911) introspective analyses of psychophysical comparisons, Experiments 2 and 3 extend the range of the semantic congruity effect to include judgments of confidence. However, in each of the three experiments, semantic congruity effects were not evident with the response-accuracy measure. Finally, using highly confusable stimuli, in Experiment 3 the magnitude of the semantic congruity effect was shown to be larger for error than for correct response times. The implications of these findings for a decisional locus of the effect and for the semantic coding theory are discussed.     

Discriminations among perceptual and symbolic stimuli

This research compares the time required for perceptual discriminations among pairs of physically present objects (circles) with the time required to discriminate pairs of symbols Inonsense syllables) that subjects learned to associate uniquely with each of the circles. Four experiments show very large differences between symbolic and perceptual discriminations. Discrimination times for the perceptual stimuli declined systematically as their size ratio increased, but discriminations among the associated nonsense syllables showed only a strictly ordinal effect of position in the series. Discriminations among the symbolic stimuli showed a large semantic congruity effect, but the perceptual stimuli showed none. The research does not replicate previous results showing similarities between perceptual and symbolic processing suggestive of image processing. We conclude that in the symbolic task subjects use only ordinal information rather than images or analog representations of the associated circles. We propose that perceptual discriminations show a semantic congruity effect only when they are processed as if the perceptual stimuli were symbolic.     

The discovery and comparison of symbolic magnitudes

Humans and other primates are able to make relative magnitude comparisons, both with perceptual stimuli and with symbolic inputs that convey magnitude information. Although numerous models of magnitude comparison have been proposed, the basic question of how symbolic magnitudes (e.g., size or intelligence of animals) are derived and represented in memory has received little attention. We argue that symbolic magnitudes often will not correspond directly to elementary features of individual concepts. Rather, magnitudes may be formed in working memory based on computations over more basic features stored in long-term memory. We present a model of how magnitudes can be acquired and compared based on BARTlet, a representationally simpler version of Bayesian Analogy with Relational Transformations (BART; Lu, Chen, & Holyoak, 2012). BARTlet operates on distributions of magnitude variables created by applying dimension-specific weights (learned with the aid of empirical priors derived from pre-categorical comparisons) to more primitive features of objects. The resulting magnitude distributions, formed and maintained in working memory, are sensitive to contextual influences such as the range of stimuli and polarity of the question. By incorporating psychological reference points that control the precision of magnitudes in working memory and applying the tools of signal detection theory, BARTlet is able to account for a wide range of empirical phenomena involving magnitude comparisons, including the symbolic distance effect and the semantic congruity effect. We discuss the role of reference points in cognitive and social decision-making, and implications for the evolution of relational representations.     

Remembered instructions with symbolic and perceptual comparisons

Semantic congruity effects (SCEs) were obtained in each of two experiments, one with symbolic comparisons and the other with comparisons of visual extents. SCEs were reliably larger when the instructions indicating the direction of the comparison were represented by consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) nonsense syllables, which had been associated with the conventional instructions in a preliminary learning phase of the experiment. Enhanced SCEs with the CVC instructions were evident, especially when stimulus pair location and instruction direction did not match. This finding is not readily explained by any non-evidence-accrual theories of the SCE (e.g., expectancy, semantic coding, and reference point) or by their accrual-based extensions. On the other hand, the general class of evidence-accrual views of SCEs, such as those developed in Leth-Steensen and Marley (2000) and in Petrusic (1992), receive considerable empirical support when the locus of the SCE is specified in terms of the congruency of stimulus pair location and the direction of the instruction.     

An event-related brain potential analysis of visual word priming effects

Two experiments are reported that provide evidence on task-induced effects during visual lexical processing in a prime-target semantic priming paradigm. The research focuses on target expectancy effects by manipulating the proportion of semantically related and unrelated word pairs. In Experiment 1, a lexical decision task was used and reaction times (RTs) and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were obtained. In Experiment 2, subjects silently read the stimuli, without any additional task demands, and ERPs were recorded. The RT and ERP results of Experiment 1 demonstrate that an expectancy mechanism contributed to the priming effect when a high proportion of related word pairs was presented. The ERP results of Experiment 2 show that in the absence of extraneous task requirements, an expectancy mechanism is not active. However, a standard ERP semantic priming effect was obtained in Experiment 2. The combined results show that priming effects due to relatedness proportion are induced by task demands and are not a standard aspect of online lexical processing.     

The Pros and Cons of Masked Priming

Masked priming paradigms offer the promise of tapping automatic, strategy-free lexical processing, as evidenced by the lack of expectancy disconfirmation effects, and proportionality effects in semantic priming experiments. But several recent findings suggest the effects may be prelexical. These findings concern nonword priming effects in lexical decision and naming, the effects of mixed-case presentation on nonword priming, and the dependence of priming on the nature of the distractors in lexical decision, suggesting possible strategy effects. The theory underlying each of these effects is discussed, and alternative explanations are developed that do not preclude a lexical basis for masked priming effects.     

The dimensional arrow: Agreement in directional mapping of dimensions among Mandarin Chinese- and English-speakers

We present evidence that English- and Mandarin-speakers agree about how to map dimensions (e.g., size and clarity) to vertical space and that they do so in a directional way. We first developed visual stimuli for four dimensions—size, clarity, complexity, and darkness—and in each case we varied the stimuli to express a range of the dimension (e.g., there were five total items expressing the range covering big, medium, and small). In our study, English- and Mandarin-speakers mapped these stimuli to an unlabelled vertical scale. Most people mapped dimensional endpoints in similar ways; using size as a standard, we found that the majority of participants mapped the clearest, most complex, and darkest items to the same end of the vertical scale as they mapped the biggest items. This indicates that all four dimensions have a weighted or unmarked end (i.e., all are directional or polar). The strong similarities in polarity across language groups contrasted with group differences on a lexical task, for which there was little cross-linguistic agreement about which comparative words to use to describe stimulus pairs (e.g., “bigger” vs. “smaller”). Thus, we found no evidence in this study that the perception of these dimensions is influenced by language.