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SPREADING ACTIVATION

المؤلف:  John Field

المصدر:  Psycholinguistics

الجزء والصفحة:  P288

2025-10-14

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SPREADING ACTIVATION

A process which speeds up the retrieval of lexical items that are associated with one that has just been seen or heard. The earlier word is sometimes said to prime the later one.

Spreading activation is automatic and not under the control of the language user. It is thus distinct from top-down processing where the wider context influences interpretation. It is subject to quite rapid decay, thus ensuring that too many items are not activated at one time.

The effects of spreading activation have been demonstrated for many types of semantic relationship including words that fall into the same lexical set (CHAIR–TABLE), antonyms (HOT–COLD), words which share functional properties (BROOM–FLOOR) and super ordinate-hyponym pairs (BIRD–ROBIN). However, the strength of the effect may depend on the strength of the association: the co-hyponyms CAT and DOG are strongly associated but the similar co-hyponyms PIG and HORSE are not. A connectionist account would represent this in terms of connections between concepts which are strengthened the more they are used.

See also: Activation, Priming effect, Semantic network