Adults' acquisition of novel dimension words: Creating a semantic congruity effect

The semantic congruity effect is exhibited when adults are asked to compare pairs of items from a series, and their response is faster when the direct ion of the comparison coincides with the location of the stimuli in the ser ies. For example, people are faster at picking the bigger of 2 big items th an the littler of 2 big items. In the 4 experiments presented, adults were taught new dimensional adjectives (mal/ler and borg/er). Characteristics of the learning situation, such as the nature of the stimulus series and the relative frequency of labeling. were varied. Results revealed that the part icipants who learned the relative meaning of the artificial dimensional adj ectives also formed categories and developed a semantic congruity effect re gardless of the characteristics of training. These findings have important implications for our understanding of adult acquisition of novel relational words, the relationship between learning such words and categorization, an d the explanations of the semantic congruity effect.