Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Date

2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Psychology

Committee Chair

Stephanie Huette

Committee Member

Gina Caucci

Committee Member

Naomi Eichorn

Abstract

Word learning begins by mapping novel words to referents in the world. Over time, this mapping becomes a reliable semantic representation with semantic relationships to other words. A major contributor to the strength of semantic relationships is context. We explored the extent to which purely linguistic context can influence semantic relationships. We used an artificial language learning task combined with the visual world paradigm to assess the degree of coactivation between yoked items. Participants learned novel words for familiar images in yoked pairs. We manipulated the linguistic context during training trials by presenting the novel words with a negation or affirmative prefix. Coactivation was measured as the proportion of fixation during testing trials where the prefixes were not present. We predicted that if linguistic context influences semantic relationships, we should see greater coactivation for word pairs leaned with the negation prefix. This prediction was not supported by our results.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to ProQuest.

Notes

Open Access

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