Modelling Functional Priming and the Associative Boost

Using an auditory semantic priming paradigm, Moss, Ostrin, Tyler and Marslen-Wilson (1995, Experiment 2) demonstrated facilitation for category coordinates and functionally-related stimuli both with and without the additive effect of normative association strength. In this paper we replicate these results computationally using a corpus-derived Contextual Similarity measure. In Experiment 1 we consider the adequacy of the Contextual Similarity measure in accounting for Moss et al.’s results, and discuss how functional and categorical semantic relations are represented in corpus-based approaches to lexical semantics. We also offer an explanation for how the Contextual Similarity measure succeeds in replicating the additive effect of association strength on semantic priming without postulating a qualitatively different mechanism for associative priming. We then investigate why previous corpus-based approaches (Lund, Burgess & Atchley, 1995) have failed to produce similar results. We argue that this is because vector representations partly encode temporal co-occurrence information. This explanation is tested in Experiment 2.