Abstract

This study investigated the semantic relatedness effect of Korean words in the word-word interference task. In the task, the participant was asked to recognize the target word while ignoring the distractor word, in a scene in which words are adjacent and presented simultaneously. Through this procedure, it is possible to examine the impact of adjacent words on the reading of target words. In Experiment 1, the distractor was either related or unrelated to the target word. We found the facilitative relatedness effect that the naming of the target word was faster and more accurate in the related condition than in the control condition. In Experiment 2, we compared the relatedness effect between when the distractor was related to the target word only associatively (associative condition) and when it was related to the target word both associatively and semantically (associative and semantic condition). We found the facilitative effect only in the associative and semantic condition, but not in the associative condition. These results suggest that both semantics and association must be activated together for the facilitative relatedness effect, and that association alone may be insufficient to show the effect.