Abstract
The semantic satiation hypothesis suggests that continuous verbalization of a word leads to a reduction in its meaning. This hypothesis was examined by having subjects repeat a priming word either once or for 30 sec prior to making a word-nonword lexical decision about a visually presented target. The primes were associated with (Experiments 1 and 3), identical to (Experiment 2), or unassociated with the word targets. As is usually found, target lexical decision times were significantly facilitated by oral priming with both the associated and identical words. While the magnitude of this facilitation effect was reduced slightly by continuous repetition of the prime in Experiment 1, no such reduction was observed in Experiments 2 and 3. These results are discussed in the context of a two-factor theory of semantic processing with the aid of Mortons logogen model. It was concluded that semantic satiation may not be semantic at all.
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Experiments 1 and 2 were reported at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in St. Louis, November 1976. This research was supported by a grant from the National Research Council of Canada to Marilyn C. Smith. The study was conducted while Lee Cohene was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto.
An erratum to this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/BF03198256.
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Cohene, L.S., Smith, M.C. & Klein, D. Semantic satiation revisited with a lexical decision task. Memory & Cognition 6, 131–140 (1978). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197438
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197438