10.3 Psycholinguistics of Word Meanings
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In the last unit, we suggested that intensions for word meanings might be organized in our minds in fuzzy categories. Our minds construct categories of things based on our experience in the world: each time we encounter an extension of a word, we count it as an exemplar in that fuzzy category. There is some evidence from psychology and psycholinguistics that our mind really does represent a difference between prototypical category members and peripheral members. For lots of categories, we have some instincts about what kinds of exemplars are prototypical and what kinds are peripheral. When we give somebody the name of a category and ask them to name an exemplar, people from a given language community are remarkably alike in the first things they name as exemplars.
In a behavioural study of word recognition, participants saw a word appear on a screen and had to say the word out loud. This is called a rapid naming task. Some of the words referred to prototypical exemplars of their particular category and some of them referred to peripheral exemplars. The prototypical and peripheral exemplars were all mixed up in the experiment, but when the researchers measured how fast people had been able to name the word that they saw, the found that people were faster to name the prototypes than the peripheral exemplars.
The same researchers used these words in a lexical decision task. In this kind of task, a word appears briefly on a screen, and the person’s job is just to decide whether it’s a word or not, and say Yes or No. So if the word pants appears on the screen, you would say “Yes”, because it’s a real word in English. But if pfonc appears, you say “no”, because that’s not a word of English. What the researchers found in the lexical decision experiment was, again, that people are fast to make a decision about a word if it refers to a prototypical category member, and slower to make the decision if the word refers to a peripheral member.
These findings indicate that the process of recognizing a word is easier and faster if that word refers to a prototype. We can interpret these findings to mean that our intensions for categories are made up of exemplars and that prototypical exemplars have a privileged position in our intensions.
So that’s a couple of examples of psycholinguistic tasks we can use to observe how words are processed in our minds: a simple naming task, and a lexical decision task. There’s an additional task that we can combine with each of these, to allow us to investigate relationships between different words. That task is called priming. A primed lexical decision task works like this: First, a word appears on the screen for a very short length of time: that word is called the prime. The prime disappears, and then a second word appears on the screen. This word is the target, and the participant makes a lexical decision about the target. The prime word can have an influenc