Four experiments investigated the classic issue in semantic memory of whether people organize categorical information in hierarchies and use inference to retrieve information from them, as proposed by Collins and Quillian (1969). Past evidence has focused on RT to confirm sentences such as "All birds are animals" or "Canaries breathe." However,…

Semantic priming is typically enhanced by target degradation in both lexical decision and pronunciation tasks. Using these tasks, we examined this priming x target degradation interaction when the prime and target were related via symmetrical (SYM) associations (e.g., "east west"), as in previous research, or for the first time via forward…

Morpheme frequency effects for derived words (e.g. an influence of the frequency of the base "dark" on responses to "darkness") have been interpreted as evidence of morphemic representation. However, it has been suggested that most derived words would not show these effects if family size (a type frequency count claimed to reflect semantic…

Chronometric studies of language and memory processing typically emphasize changes in mean response time (RT) performance across conditions. However, changes in mean performance (or the lack thereof) may reflect distinct patterns at the level of underlying RT distributions. In seven experiments, RT distributional analyses were used to better…

Bloem and La Heij (2003) reported that in a word-translation task context words induce semantic interference whereas context pictures induce semantic facilitation. This finding was accounted for by a model of lexical access in which: (a) semantic facilitation is localized at the conceptual level, (b) semantic interference is localized at the…