Effect of Semantic Relatedness on Magnitude of Priming

Abstract

Words in the lexicon are assumed to be organised in semantic fields or network. Every word in the lexicon is related to another word belonging to the same lexical category or sharing common features and this kind of relationship is called semantic relatedness. Further, a word in the lexicon is related to many words through semantic relatedness but extent of relationship between the words is not same. Purpose: The study aimed to determine influence of semantic relatedness through priming in adolescents. Method: Thirty participants (mean age fifteen years) participated. Sixty prime-target pairs were presented through DMDX 5.0. Thirty were semantically related and thirty semantically unrelated. Among thirty semantically related word pairs, eight pairs were super-ordinate pairs and category coordinate pairs, derivatives and functional coordinates were seven each. Semantic judgment was the task. Results: The mean reaction time and accuracy scores for only semantically related scores on the four ordinates were considered and it was found that mean reaction time and accuracy scores were better for super-ordinates followed by category coordinates, derivatives and functional ordinates. Conclusion: Based on the results of the study it’s clear that the extent of relatedness would vary depending on the semantic distance.