The Absoluteness of Semantic Processing: Lessons from the Analysis of Temporal Clusters in Phonemic Verbal Fluency

Isabelle Vonberg, Felicitas Ehlen, Ortwin Fromm and Fabian Klostermann

PLOS ONE, 2014, vol. 9, issue 12, 1-16

Abstract: Background: For word production, we may consciously pursue semantic or phonological search strategies, but it is uncertain whether we can retrieve the different aspects of lexical information independently from each other. We therefore studied the spread of semantic information into words produced under exclusively phonemic task demands. Methods: 42 subjects participated in a letter verbal fluency task, demanding the production of as many s-words as possible in two minutes. Based on curve fittings for the time courses of word production, output spurts (temporal clusters) considered to reflect rapid lexical retrieval based on automatic activation spread, were identified. Semantic and phonemic word relatedness within versus between these clusters was assessed by respective scores (0 meaning no relation, 4 maximum relation). Results: Subjects produced 27.5 (±9.4) words belonging to 6.7 (±2.4) clusters. Both phonemically and semantically words were more related within clusters than between clusters (phon: 0.33±0.22 vs. 0.19±0.17, p

Date: 2014
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0115846

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0115846

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