SEMANTIC MEMORY AND THE GRANULARITY OF SEMANTIC RELATIONS - EVIDENCE FROM SPEED ACCURACY DECOMPOSITION

In the present study we examined whether semantic relations are atomis tic unitary associations, or are complex concepts consisting of a numb er of relational elements. The complexity of the ownership relation wa s assessed by combining a relation verification task (''Many people ow n [cars/comets]'') with the speed-accuracy decomposition procedure (Me yer, Irwin, Osman, & Kounios, 1988). The latter permits one to determi ne whether subjects achieve their final state of response accuracy in a single, discrete all-or-none transition, or whether the relevant pro cesses yield partial information representing intermediate states of k nowledge. The rationale was that the retrieval of a unitary relational link from a classical associative network should be an all-or-none af fair. In contrast, a set of relational elements need not be processed as a urinary bundle, thereby allowing partial response-information sta tes. In two experiments, we found evidence of such partial information (i.e., sensitivity in units of d'), lending support to the notion tha t relations are complex. Furthermore, the results suggest that the acc umulation of guessing sensitivity was linear over time, weighing again st alternate theoretical interpretations.