Locus of Semantic Satiation Examined with a Serial Matching Task

Abstract

Semantic satiation is the apparent loss of the meaning of a word following continuous exposure to that word. An experiment using a serial-matching task was conducted to assess whether the locus of semantic satiation is the level of letter processing or that of word processing. 20 participants gazed at a prime (word or nonword) for 3 sec. or 30 sec. and then judged whether the subsequently presented target was identical to the prime or not. In the word matching in which the prime and target were identical, the matching times were longer after the 30-sec. inspection than after the 3-sec inspection, whereas in the nonword matching, the matching times were not changed by the prolonged inspection. This result suggests that semantic satiation for visual words occurs at a level of word processing.