Abstract
Four experiments dealt with the verification of semantic relations. In Experiment I, subjects decided whether an instance was a member of a specified category. For some categories (for example, birds) verification was faster when the target category was a direct superordinate (bird) than a higher level superordinate (animal), while for another category (mammal) this finding reversed. Experiment II obtained ratings of semantic distance that accounted for the previously obtained verification results. Multidimensional scaling of the ratings suggested that semantic distance could be represented as Euclidean distance in a semantic space. Experiments III and IV indicated that semantic distance could predict RTs in another categorization task and choices in an analogies task. These results place constraints on a theory of semantic memory.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1-20 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Journal | Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 1973 |
Funding
Current interest in how semantic relations are represented in memory has led to the use of tasks in which a pair of nouns is presented and the subject is required to make a rapid semantic decision about them. In one such task (Collins & Quillian, 1969), the subject verifies statements of the form "An S is a P" (such as, A robin is a bird), where S and P, the two nouns of interest, serve as subject and predicate noun, respectively. In this kind of paradigm it is possible to compare sentences that use the same subject noun but different predicate nouns, Pi and Pj, where Pi is a subset of P~ (for example, A robin is a bird vs A robin is an animal). The finding resulting from such a comparison is that the statement involving the subset predicate (bird)is verified faster than that containing the superset predicate z This paper has greatly benefited from the extensive suggestions of several colleagues, notably A. A. Abrahamson, W. P. Banks, H. H. Clark, E. R. Heider, S. M. Kosslyn, and E. F. Loftus. The research was supported by a United States Public Health Grant (MH-19705) to the third author. Requests for reprints should be sent to Edward E. Smith, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Medicine