From Bye-Bye to Buy-Buy: Influence of Homophone Priming on Judgment and Behavior (original) (raw)

Strategic effects in associative priming with words, homophones, and pseudohomophones.

2002

Abstract 1. G. Lukatela and MT Turvey (1994x) showed that at a 57-ms prime-presentation duration, the naming of a visually presented target word (frog) is primed not only by an associate word (toad) but also by a homophone (towed) and a pseudohomophone (tode) of the associate. At a 250-ms prime presentation, priming with the homophone was no longer observed. In Experiment 1, the authors replicated these priming effects in the Dutch language.

Cross-modal repetition priming of heterographic homophones

2001

We thank Bob Lorch and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this work. A special thanks to Madeleine Leveillé for help in preparing the present study, and her invaluable service to experimental psychology over the last 40 years.

Perception and preference in short-term word priming

Psychological Review, 2001

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iv Acknowledgements Many people were instrumental to the development, execution, and writing of this thesis. Most important among these is my advisor, Richard Shiffrin. His insight and guidance are sprinkled liberally throughout this work. Nearly all the experiments were designed and performed through the hard work and dedication of two students: Keith Lyle and Kirsten Ruys. Their names, as well as Richard Shiffrin's, appear in a version of this work submitted for publication. Besides those directly involved in the priming studies, there was a supporting cast of characters. Most important amongst these were Karen Loffland and Coralee Sons who made all the red tape melt away. Without the expertise of Bill Wang the technical difficulties would have been insurmountable. The advice and comments of members of the Shiffrin lab, which included Mark Steyvers, David Diller, Denis Cousineau, Amy Criss, Lael Schooler, Rachel Shoup and Peter Nobel, were invaluable. William K. Estes and Eric-Jan Wagenmakers deserve recognition for helpful comments on early drafts of this thesis. I am grateful to my parents, Ernest and Ellen, for bringing me into this world and instilling in me a sense of scientific curiousity. Most important of all, I would like to thank my wife, Christina Anderson, who believed in me through it all. v

How seemingly innocuous words can bias judgment: Semantic prosody and impression formation

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

Would we think more negatively of a person who caused rather than produced an outcome or who is described as utterly rather than totally unconventional? While these word choices may appear to be trivial, cause and utterly occur more frequently in a negative context in natural language use than produced or totally, even though these words do not have an explicit valenced meaning. Words that are primarily used in a valenced context are said to have semantic prosody. Five studies show that semantically-prosodic descriptors affect the impressions formed of others. These effects occur even in situations where perceivers are likely to be skeptical of messages, and they impact behavioral intentions toward targets. An utterly changed person was perceived as less warm and competent than a totally changed person (Study 1), and people held more negative impressions of an utterly rather than totally unconventional boss (Study 2). People had stronger intentions to vote for a political candidate who produced budget changes over one who caused them (Study 3) and preferred a bank that lends money (a word with positive semantic prosody) over a bank that loans money (Study 4). Finally, participants had more (less) romantic interest in potential dating partners with Tinder profiles that utilized words with positive (negative) semantic prosody (Study 5). We conclude that semantically prosodic descriptors that lack a clear positive or negative meaning still lead people to infer the valence of what is to come, which colors the impressions they form of others.

The subjective familiarity of English homophones

Memory & Cognition, 1987

College students rated 828 homophonic words (words with the same pronunciation but different spellings) in terms of subjective familiarity. High interrater reliability was obtained, and the ratings correlated well with other published familiarity measures (r=.85). The familiarity ratings also correlated highly with log transforms of Ku (!era and Francis's (1967) printed frequency measures (r=.75). However, many words of equal log frequency varied widely in rated familiarity, and vice versa. To determine which of these two factors was the better predictor of verbal performance, we orthogonally varied the two in a lexical decision task and found that, for words of moderate frequency, rated familiarity was by far the better predictor. We conclude that even though printed frequency and rated familiarity generally covary, printed frequency is a less reliable index of the underlying psychological construct, word familiarity.

Influences on spelling: evidence from homophones

Three experiments used homophones as a test case to examine the roles of phonology and morphology in the spelling process. We introduced university students to novel meanings of spoken forms, for example, presenting /fid/ as a rare word for a type of furniture. We asked whether participants avoided spelling the new word as ‹feed›, instead using alternatives such as ‹fead›. Although participants produced some alternative spellings, they used spellings that resulted in homophones, i.e. spelled /i/ as ‹ee›, more often in items like /fid/ than in control items like /fip/. Participants were more likely to use novel spellings for homophones when given a choice between a novel spelling and an alternative than when asked to produce their own spellings. A major influence on spelling production thus appears to be the lesser effort that is required to use a familiar whole-word orthographic form compared to that needed for assembling a novel spelling.

Phonological representations and repetition priming

1999

An ubiquitous phenomenon in psychology is the 'repetition effect': a repeated stimulus is processed better on the second occurrence than on the first. Yet, what counts as a repetition? When a spoken word is repeated, is it the acoustic shape or the linguistic type that matters? In the present study, we contrasted the contribution of acoustic and phonological features by using participants with different linguistic backgrounds: they came from two populations sharing a common vocabulary (Catalan) yet possessing different phonemic systems [1]. They performed a lexical decision task with lists containing words that were repeated verbatim, as well as words that were repeated with one phonetic feature changed. The feature changes were phonemic, i.e. linguistically relevant, for one population, but not for the other. The results revealed that the repetition effect was modulated by linguistic, not acoustic, similarity: it depended on the subjects' phonemic system.

Morphological priming in the German mental lexicon

Cognition, 1999

We present results from cross-modal priming experiments on German participles and noun plurals. The experiments produced parallel results for both in¯ectional systems. Regular in¯ection exhibits full priming whereas irregularly in¯ected word forms show only partial priming: after hearing regularly in¯ected words (-t participles and -s plurals), lexical decision times on morphologically related word forms (presented visually) were similar to reaction times for a base-line condition in which prime and target were identical, but signi®cantly shorter than in a control condition where prime and target were unrelated. In contrast, prior presentation of irregular words (-n participles and -er plurals) led to signi®cantly longer response times on morphologically related word forms than the prior presentation of the target itself. Hence, there are clear priming differences between regularly and irregularly in¯ected German words. We compare the ®ndings on German with experimental results on regular and irregular in¯ection in English and Italian, and discuss theoretical implications for single versus dual-mechanism models of in¯ection. q 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Investigating the mechanisms underlying affective priming effects using a conditional pronunciation task

… (formerly Zeitschrift für …, 2006

Recently, using a conditional pronunciation task, De reported evidence of affective priming effects only when pronunciation depended on the semantic category of targets. Although these findings support the notion that spreading of activation is the mechanism underlying affective priming effects, an explanation in terms of postlexical mechanism could not be ruled out. To clarify this point, we conducted two experiments in which nouns for both the to-be-pronounced as well as the not-to-be pronounced targets were used and all stimuli were affectively valenced words. In Experiment 1, the to-be-pronounced targets were object-words, and the not-to-be-pronounced targets were person-words, whereas in Experiment 2, the instructions were reversed. Results of experiment 1 showed affective priming effects only when pronunciation of target words was conditional upon their semantic category. Most importantly, affective priming effects were observed for both object-words (Experiment 1) and person-words (Experiment 2). These results are compatible with a spreading activation account, but not with a postlexical mechanism account of affective priming effects in the pronunciation task.