The Journal of General Psychology9 2000,127(3), 219-326 Adults ’ Acquisition of Novel Dimension Words: Creating a Semantic Congruity Effect

ABSTRACT. 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 direction of the com-parison coincides with the location of the stimuli in the series. For example, people are faster at picking the bigger of 2 big items than the littler of 2 big items. In the 4 experi-ments presented, adults were taught new dimensional adjectives (malAer 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 participants who learned the relative meaning of the artificial dimensional adjectives also formed categories and developed a semantic congruity effect regardless 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, and the explanations of the semantic congruity e f f p. IN A NOW CLASSIC PAPER, Bierswisch (1967) suggested that the study of dimensional adjectives merited special attention for what they could tell us about the properties of mind. He argued that the structure of dimensional adjectives “di