
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.
Library Comment
Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to ProQuest.
Notes
Open Access
Recommended Citation
Heath, David Aaron, "Negation as Cue During Semantic Learning" (2024). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3683.
https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/etd/3683
Comments
Data is provided by the student.