Socialness Effects in Lexical-Semantic Processing

Contemporary theories of semantic representation posit that social experience is an important source of information for deriving meaning. However, there is a lack of behavioural evidence in support of this proposal. The aim of present work was to test whether words’ degree of social relevance, or socialness, influences lexical-semantic processing. In Study 1, across a series of item-level regression analyses, we found (1) that socialness can facilitate responses in lexical, semantic and memory tasks, and (2) limited evidence for an interaction of socialness with concreteness. In Studies 2-3, we tested the pre-registered hypothesis that social, compared to non-social words, will be associated with faster and more accurate responses during a syntactic classification task. We found that socialness has a facilitatory effect on noun decisions (Study 3), but not verb decisions (Study 2). Overall, our results suggest that the socialness of a word affects lexical-semantic processing but also that this is task-dependent. These findings constitute novel evidence in support of proposals that social experience is an important dimension of semantic representation.