title: Is the motor or the garage more important to the car? The difference between semantic associations in single word and sentence production.
abstract: The aim of the present study was to investigate the impact of part-whole (e.g., car-motor) and functional associations (e.g., car-garage) on single word (Experiment 1) and sentence production (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, a classical picture-word task was used. In Experiment 2, the same stimuli and distractors were embedded into a sentence. The relation between target and distractor was either part-whole, functional or unrelated. At single word level, part-whole and functional relations facilitate naming. Additionally, the facilitation effect was stronger for part-whole in comparison to functional associations. During sentence production, facilitation shifted to interference. The difference between both relations disappeared. The findings of the different effects between functional and part-whole associations depend on the length of utterances and highlight the divergent impact of associations. The differences between part-whole and functional associations in single word production might reflect a differential organization of associative links at the conceptual level. In contrast, during sentence production the syntactic processing at the lexical level seem to be more important than types of semantic associations at the conceptual level.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Medical School, RWTH Aachen University, Pauwelsstr. 30, 52074 Aachen, Germany. jmuehlhaus@ukaachen.de
authors.forename: Juliane
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Muehlhaus
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Heim
authors.forename: Olga
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Sachs
authors.forename: Frank
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Schneider
authors.forename: Ute
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Habel
authors.forename: Katharina
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Sass
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001244:Association; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D005858:Germany; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012660:Semantics; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology*