Poster D27, Wednesday, August 21, 2019, 5:15 – 7:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
The dynamic influence of newly established associations between concepts on the semantic network
Jinfeng Ding1,2, Yufang Yang1,2;1CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, 2Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
Previous studies on semantic memory mainly focused on the relatively static neuro-cognitive architecture of the conceptual representation, leaving its dynamic changes underexplored. With the EEG (electroencephalograph) technique, the current study aimed to investigate the updating of conceptual system which resulted from the new associations established between known concepts in contextual reading. We constructed two types of contexts in which the critical words were embedded in two sentences. In the new association (NA) condition, the critical words were associated with other known concepts. In the original meaning (OM) condition, the critical words represented their original meanings. Participants read the contexts and inferred the meaning of the critical words in the NA condition. Immediately after reading and 24-hrs later, they performed a lexical decision task in the semantic priming paradigm and a cued-recall memory task. In the lexical decision task, the critical words in the contexts served as the primes. Words semantically related and unrelated to the original meanings served as the targets. In the cued-recall memory task, participants were presented with the critical words and asked to write down their meanings in the contexts. Immediately after reading, the EEG results revealed a semantic priming effect in the OM condition, with the semantically related words eliciting a smaller N400 than the unrelated words. However, this semantic priming effect was smaller in the NA condition, indicating that the new associations established between known concepts interfered with the semantic spreading-activation of the original meanings in the semantic network. Twenty-four hours later, the semantic priming effects between the OM and NA conditions were not significantly different, although the cued-recall task showed that participants could remember more than half new associations on the next day. This results imply that the interference might be context-dependent and modulated by the strength of the new associations. Our findings suggest that the semantic network dynamically changes with the language usage.
Themes: Meaning: Lexical Semantics, Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)