Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An important aspect of human cognition is our ability to adapt our behavior to changing situations and contexts. Semantic control is generally broken into two different modes acting at varying levels of domain specificity: general rule-based selection or contextually-altered semantic space. The current study examines how context shifts influence associative behavior across three context domains. We instructed participants to make word associations as if they were interacting with a toddler (i.e. child condition), interacting with a peer (i.e. peer), or to just produce short words. We found that participants in the child condition produced more child-directed speech than the other conditions. Specifically, these responses were shorter, acquired earlier, and higher frequency and contextual diversity. Additionally, the child condition resulted in different representational similarity structure than the other two conditions, providing evidence for a context-effect that is less rule based and more akin to a flexible shifting of semantic space.