Date of Award

Spring 2014

First Advisor

Angela C. Jones

Abstract

Semantic satiation research indicates that weakly-related semantic information is more satiated than highly-related information (Balota & Black, 1997). In the current studies, we used biased ambiguous words to investigate possible differences in satiation and the duration of satiation. Participants read ambiguous cues 3 or 30 times and either immediately or after a delay made a CUE----TARGET relatedness judgement. Targets were consistent with the dominant or subordinate meaning or unrelated to either. Experiments 1 and 2 satiated noun-noun homographs (e.g.,calf). Experiment 2 included a delayed relatedness judgement and indicated that satiation becomes extinct after no more that one minute (contrary to, e.g., Kuhl & Anderson, 2011). Experiment 3 also satiated noun-verb homographs (e.g., duck). Evidence of satiation was found among the immediate response tasks. Experiment 3 supported the theory that greater semantic distance exists between alternative meanings of noun-verb ambiguous words compared with noun-noun ambiguous words (Mirman et al., 2010).

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