Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Spread of activation and interaction between dififerent types of knowledge representations in the mental lexicon were investigated in three semantically mediated phonological priming experiments, conducted on both English and Chinese. Facilitatory effects were found in naming not only for words (e.g., boy) that were semantically related to their primes (e.g., girl), but also for words that were homophonic to the semantic targets (e.g., buoy). The amount of priming varied according to whether homophone targets were also orthographically similar to semantic targets. An inhibitory priming effect was also found for words that were orthographically similar to but phonologically different from semantic targets. It is concluded that spread of activation between words sharing semantic properties is not encapsulated in the semantic system. The phonological and orthographic representations of words receiving spread of semantic activation are also automatically and immediately activated, even though they are not supported directly by sensory input.