SEMANTIC PRIMING

Semantic Priming



Semantic Priming

Introduction

Semantic priming has been a focus of research in the cognitive sciences for more than thirty years and is commonly used as a tool for investigating other aspects of perception and cognition, such as word recognition, language comprehension, and knowledge representations(Kohnert Windsor 2004 pp.891-903). Semantic Priming: Perspectives from Memory and Word Recognition examines empirical and theoretical advancements in the understanding of semantic priming, providing a succinct, in-depth review of this important phenomenon, framed in terms of models of memory and models of word recognition.

Lexical organisation

If we could look to a science of linguistics to tell us how language functions, we should be better placed to talk about language origins and development. But at this point one must recognise what the state of affairs in linguistics now is. The comments made here may be contentious and almost certainly will be resented and dismissed by those professionally committed to linguistics but a negative judgment of the worth of linguistics is justified, even though the terms used may seem severe. Linguistics, as a modern science, has failed in its objective of understanding the functioning of language, and this failure extends both to syntax and to lexicon. If we are profitably to explore the origins and development of language, we need a new linguistics as our starting point. There is no use in searching for the prehistoric antecedents of the unclear and unsettled account of language given by modern linguistics. Chomsky led the study of syntax into a quagmire from which it has not yet emerged; the lexicon and semantics of language were for many years neglected and damagingly separated from the study of syntax, to which logically they should be prior(Kohnert Windsor 2004 pp.891-903).

The new linguistics must be founded on quite different principles from those of the transformational-generative school and its successors, and must move in a quite different direction. The new principles might be these(Bialystok Majumder Martin 2003 pp.27-44):

1. Linguistics must be integrated with biology, physiology, neurology and psychology. It must become a real part of the biological and behavioural sciences. The evolution of language, as well as the functioning of language, must be treated as an integral aspect of general human evolution.

2. Nothing in the experience of language should be treated as chance, arbitrary or 'purely cultural'. Language is an instrument which has undergone the same pressures and served the same objectives of human adaptation as other aspects of human behaviour and human physical abilities.

3. The fact that there are different languages, with different words and different syntactic processes is not to be treated as a boundary which linguistics must not cross but as the starting point for research into the underlying processes by which the different languages achieve the same end. Linguistics should again become a genuinely comparative science.

4. The basic task of the new linguistics should be to give a verified account of how language, a modulated stream of sound, communicates experience from one human to another, from one brain to ...