Activating semantic knowledge during spoken words and environmental sounds: Evidence from the visual world paradigm

Two visual world experiments investigated the activation of semantically related concepts during the processing of environmental sounds and spoken words. Participants heard environmental sounds such as barking or spoken words such as “puppy” while viewing visual arrays with objects such as a bone (semantically related competitor) and candle (unrelated distractor). In Experiment 1, a puppy (target) was also included in the visual array; in Experiment 2, it was not. During both types of auditory stimuli, competitors were fixated significantly more than distractors, supporting the co-activation of semantically related concepts in both cases; comparisons of the two types of auditory stimuli also revealed significantly greater effects with environmental sounds than spoken words. We discuss implications of these results for theories of semantic knowledge.