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Accessing our dictionary

Before reading this section, I had the intuitive impression that our brain encodes lexical entries in a way that is more or less similar to a dictionary. It now turned out that we activate all possible words compatible with the acoustic input till the process of recognition determines which of these possibilities is the right one. The author points out to Zwitserlood findings in her cross-modal priming task: how a word can prime another word, e.g. Captain - ship, that we tend to respond faster to more common words than to less common ones (pp. 72-73). Here, I faced some difficulty understanding what he means by the "priming effect." Does it imply that a word would activate other related ones? Ex. "father" would activate "son", "daughter", ... etc. Or Is it just that a prime word (pilot) is proved to be activated based on the fact that the person would choose its target (airplane)?!

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on January 29, 2008 5:04 AM.

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