HIGH POINT, N.C., March 26, 2015 – Dr. Kimberly Wear, associate professor of psychology at High Point University, recently presented results from a study on the cognitive effects behind interpreting words with multiple meanings. She shared this research at the annual meeting of the North Carolina Cognition Group held at Elon University.
Wear’s presentation, titled “Homograph Priming Effects Are Independent of Environmental Context,” examined whether environmental context affects how people process homographs, words that are spelled the same but have separate meanings. She did this by showing research participants images of one meaning of a homograph and then asking some participants to change rooms before giving them a list of homographs and asking them to write down the first word to come to mind.
“When you read the word ‘bat,’ both meanings – animal and baseball – are brought to consciousness. The context of the sentence provides the basis for us choosing one particular meaning,” Wear explains. “Our research focused on what happens to the unselected, contextually inappropriate meaning. Priming a homograph toward one meaning resulted in faster processing of words related to either meaning, and this was not influenced by the environmental context in which the word was presented. The research supports the idea that semantic memory, which includes vocabulary, is not affected by environmental context.”
Wear adds that this research contributes to her long-term focus on behavioral inhibition in memory, or a person’s ability to prevent intrusive, unwanted memories from coming into consciousness. By understanding how memory works, she says, researchers will be able to predict future memory behavior and improve it.
Wear collaborated with Dr. David Gorfein of the University of Texas at Dallas on this research project. HPU sophomore Brooke Liberto and senior Michelle Woodard also helped Wear with data entry and coding. These students, along with senior Amanda Szymanski, will assist with new studies taking place in the spring.