Events Calendar

Meaning and Memory Retrieval: Evidence from Semantic Priming and Sentence Memory

Speaker: Peter Gordon, University of Northern Carolina, Chapel Hill

Talk Title: Meaning and Memory Retrieval: Evidence from Semantic Priming and Sentence Memory

Abstract: Semantic priming, where the processing of a word is facilitated when it is preceded by a related word, has generally been taken as evidence of spreading activation, the idea that accessing the meaning of the prime word facilitates recognition of the target word by pre-activating its meaning before it is presented. The idea that pre-activation of meaning by a prime word (or other stimulus) increases the accessibility of words (or other psychological constructs) has spread from cognitive psychology to many other areas including cognitive neuroscience, social influence, psychopathology and the effects of aging. This idea is challenged by a series of studies in my lab that analyzed response-time distributions from newly-developed ocular-response tasks that are performed more quickly than tasks with manual or vocal responses and for that reason give a more direct view of lexical processing; the results show that the semantic relation between the prime and target influences processing only after the target has been seen. The findings are inconsistent with spreading-activation models and instead support alternative models in which the process of retrieving lexical information from the target word is facilitated by the consistent contextual information provided by the prime word. Additional studies on how meaning influences sentence reading and recall demonstrate that explanations based on memory retrieval play a necessary role in explanations of human language processing and that they eliminate the need for expectation-based explanations.

Biography: Dr. Peter C. Gordon received his B.S. in Psychology from Georgetown University in 1975 and his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1984. He was Assistant and Associate Professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard University from 1984 through 1993, and subsequently joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he is Professor of Psychology and Faculty Fellow at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and a superannuated member of the Psychological Round Table. He has served as a reviewer for multiple NSF programs (Cognition & Perception, Information & Intelligent Systems and Linguistics) and as a member of the Language and Communication panel at NIH. He served a four-year term as Associate Editor at Psychological Science, has been on the editorial boards of major journals (Cognitive Psychology, JEP:LMC) and is a Consulting Editor at Psychological Review. His awards include appointment as John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor at Harvard University, a W.N. Reynolds Leave from the University of North Carolina and a James McKeen Cattell Fund Sabbatical Award that is supporting his visit to USC this semester.
Dr. Gordon's program of research focuses on uncovering the psychological basis of language comprehension and production, with a particular focus on the nature of discourse coherence and on the interaction of discourse-level processing and lower-level processes such as word recognition. His research on the processing of written and spoken language has been highly interdisciplinary, including long-term collaborations with researchers trained in computer science, linguistics and neuroscience, as well as researchers with clinical specializations. His recent research has involved coordinated use of behavioral and neural methods for studying how language processing is coordinated with perception, attention, memory and motor control, and has additionally involved development of eye-tracking and computational-linguistic methods for studying cognitive and interpersonal processes in normal and impaired populations.

Host: Shrikanth Narayanan

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Tanya Acevedo-Lam/EE-Systems