Dimensions of Speech Perception: Semantic Associations in the Affective Lexicon

The affective lexicon has been explained in terms of three underlying dimensions: Evaluation, Activity, and Potency. We assessed the importance of these dimensions during online speech perception. Participants made speeded lexical decisions about emotion words that were heard in a tone of voice that was either congruent or incongruent with the word's meaning. The denotative semantic category from which words were chosen was significantly related to lexical decision times (P < 0.001). Tone of voice did not influence decision times, nor did it interact with semantic category. Regression analyses showed that lexical decision times were significantly predicted by dimension weights on Potency, and by the three-way interaction between dimension weights on Evaluation, Activity, and Potency (both P s < 0.001). The implications of this study for models of knowledge representation and perception are discussed.