Semantic Complexity and Language Production: Simple vs. Complex Verbs

In language production, it has been shown that lemmas that share overlapping semantic features cause interference for each other's production when encoded in the same local context. This research examined how differences in the morphological and/or semantic componential complexity of verbs affect the accuracy of producing them in speech. Three experiments tested the hypothesis that more complex verbs replace their simpler counterparts more often than vice versa in contextual errors due to being associated with a greater number of activated semantic features at the point of lemma selection. Experiment 1 examined the light/heavy contrast involving specification of manner, Experiment 2 investigated the antonymic contrast between verbs where one is semantically and/or morphologically marked, and Experiment 3 examined the contrast between verbs that differ with respect to inflectional morphology. The results support a compositional view of verb meaning and have implications for the role of semantic features in lemma retrieval.