CHAPTER 3 THE THEORETICAL BACKBONE
3.3 PRIMING
3.3.2 FACILITATING ACCESS TO THE SEMANTIC MEMORY
Moving on from the theory, Quillian and Collins (1969; 1970 &
1972a), discussing retrieval from the semantic memory, publish the
results of a series of experiments. The last of these makes use of the term
priming. The research involved checking the reaction times of volunteers
to find out that true sentences (tennis is a game) have a shorter reaction
time than false
57ones (football is a lottery). They linked these findings to
what was termed semantic memory:
Priming is understood to be a process by which concepts and their meanings in semantic memory are activated, regardless of the origin of that activation.
(Collins & Quillian: 1972. Quoted in Ashcraft 1976: 490)
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This work in turn started a whole flurry of experiments by
psycholinguists like Loftus (1973), Posner & Snyder (1975a), Collins &
Quillian (1975) themselves, and Ashcraft (1976) and, significantly, led to
the seminal paper by Meyer & Schvanefeldt, entitled Facilitation in
recognizing pairs of words. Evidence of a dependence between retrieval
operations. (1971).
The importance in the context of these studies is the phrase pairs of
words, which links to J. R. Firth’s notion of collocation, the importance of
which has been highlighted also by Halliday (1959 etc.) Sinclair (1991)
and Hoey (2005 etc.). Meyer and Schvanefeldt’s paper links an insight
derived from psycholinguistic experimental evidence with a
theoretical concept that has acquired significance in corpus
linguistics.
In Meyer and Schvanefeldt’s experiment, candidates have to link
English words to unassociated words or related words.
We showed that such decisions are faster when one word (e.g., ‘nurse’) is preceded by another semantically related word (e.g., ‘doctor’). [than linked with a unassociated word, e.g. bread – MP-S]
[Positive] responses averaged 85 ± 19 msec. faster for pairs of associated words than for pairs of unassociated words. (Meyer & Schvanefeldt [1971] 1984: 20)
The response time for collocates, therefore, was shown to be decisively
quicker than the one for unrelated terms. This indicated that the mind of
the reader / listener has a mental, subconsciously made connection
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between these two nodes. Meyer and Schvanefeldt point out that “the
results of [their experiment] suggest that degree of association is a
powerful factor affecting lexical decisions in the (…) task.” (Meyer &
Schvanefeldt 1971: 229)
Sinclair’s (1991) view that collocations mainly occur within 5 steps on
either side of a word is an observation of how words appear in texts. That
there is a possible link to how words are linked in one’s memory finds
support in the following results described by Meyer and Schvanefeldt:
(…) responses to pairs of associated words would be faster than those to pairs of unassociated words. This follows because the proximity of associated words in the memory structure permits faster accessing of information for the second decision. The argument holds even if the accessed information is (a) sufficient only to determine whether a string is a word and (b) does not include aspects of its meaning.
(Meyer & Schvanefeldt 1971: 232)
The key here is the proximity of associated words – one word acts as
prime and the mind is already set to expect a limited set of options to
follow. Meyer and Schvanefeldt go on to claim that this is a mental
process that does not only reside in the short-term memory:
(…) any retrieval operation R2 that is required sufficiently soon after another operation R1 will generally depend on R1. This would mean that human long-term memory, like many bulk-storage devices, lacks the property known in the computer literature as random access (cf. McCormick, 1959, p. 103). (Meyer & Schvanefeldt 1971: 232)
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This would explain why computer users, understandably, feel that their
machine cannot think or is illogical. The fact is, that the logic of a RAM
(Random Access Memory) has little in common with the network that
binds information together in the human memory.
Finally, Meyer and Schvanefeldt refine Quillian's concept of
linking words as nested strings
58. They note:
We previously have argued that processing normally begins with a decision about the top string and then proceeds to a decision about the bottom one. Let us now assume that memory is organized by familiarity as well as by meaning, with frequently examined locations in one "sector" and infrequently examined locations in another sector.
(Meyer & Schvanefeldt 1971: 232)
This means the familiarity, and hence the priming of a term, is mapped
for its likely use and environment in the language-users’ mind.
Meyer and Schvanefeldt claim, in their 1976 paper, unambiguously
sub-titled
People's rapid reactions to words help reveal how stored
semantic information is retrieved, that their set-up differs from most
other experiments in the field, in that they do not seek to measure
speakers’ mistakes but the reaction time people take making lexical
58
See Quillian (1969: 472): [this] does not output as a parsing a tree structure, but rather a set of nested strings. However, in building these strings it succeeds in "undoing" a number of syntactic transformations, replacing deleted elements and rearranging others.
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choices. Interestingly, the rate of error is remarkably low, indicating how
sure-footed language users are in their native language:
But the reaction times depended significantly on the set relations between the categories. When the meanings of the category names were closely related to each other, reaction times tended to be shorter.
(…)
People were about 55 ± 7 milliseconds faster on the average at recognizing a word like BUTTER if it followed the related word BREAD than if it followed the unrelated word NURSE (20). (Meyer & Schvanefeldt 1976: 30)
The difference in milliseconds, becomes significantly large when
compared at this level. Meyer and Schvanefeldt do not use the term
lexical priming, but it is clear to readers familiar with concordances that
BREAD and BUTTER are likely to be in each others’ company, while
BREAD and NURSE are not. This, then, would experimentally confirm
the foundations of the LP theory. Indeed, the notion of lexical priming, in
all but name, is supported by another set of experiments described by the
authors. Once words are made harder to decipher, the semantic memory
assists recognition:
Degrading the legibility with [a] pattern of dots increased reaction times by more than 100 Milliseconds. The harmful effect of degradation was significantly less, however, for related words than for unrelated words, suggesting that semantic relatedness helped to overcome the visual distortions produced by the degradation.
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Hoey (2005) notes that lexical priming does not simply mean
connecting lexically / semantically related words. In fact, some primes
(e.g. VERY) have little lexical content. That these still play an important
part of the semantic memory is pointed out by Quillian (1969). Meyer and
Schvanefeldt highlight that it is not necessarily the “meaning” of a word
that makes it act as a prime and, consequently, ask for further
investigation
59:
It is not true, however, that close relations of meaning always facilitate mental processing of words. Some processes are actually inhibited when they must deal with two words that have related meanings. (…) The apparent inhibition raises more questions about what semantic information is stored in human memory and how the information is used. (Meyer & Schvanefeldt 1976: 31)
This could be seen as an explanation why synonyms, though clearly
related, are not fully interchangeable in all contexts. As spoken language
production is not pre-planned and aims to be fluent with as little
hesitation as possible, the words (chunks of words) that have least
inhibition will tend to be the preferred choice. Hoey (2005) states that
words either prefer or avoid the company of others. The apparent
inhibition is assumed to be because these words, even if semantically
related, have not been primed for the speaker to occur together.
6059
I discuss the link of “meaning” and “priming” in section 3.4.1
60 While we can speak of a tall order and a tall boy, there is a high tower (not *tall tower or *high boy). Talking of a high order (highest order is more common usage) actually means something very different compared to tall order.