# How does the creation of new semantic relationships during dialogue impact long-term semantic representations after dialogue?

Alicia Fasquel, Wassila El Mardi, Isabelle Bonnotte, Dominique Knutsen, Angèle Brunellière

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## ► To cite this version:

Alicia Fasquel, Wassila El Mardi, Isabelle Bonnotte, Dominique Knutsen, Angèle Brunellière. How does the creation of new semantic relationships during dialogue impact long-term semantic representations after dialogue?. Acta Psychologica, 2025, 260, pp.105513. 10.1016/j.actpsy.2025.105513. hal-05442278

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# How does the creation of new semantic relationships during dialogue impact long-term semantic representations after dialogue?

Alicia Fasquel<sup>a, *</sup>, Wassila El Mardi<sup>b</sup>, Isabelle Bonnotte<sup>a</sup>, Dominique Knutsen<sup>a</sup>, Angèle Brunellière<sup>a, c, *</sup>

## ARTICLE INFO

### Keywords:

Dialogue

New semantic relationships

Long-term semantic representations

Semantic priming

Attention and updating of semantic representations

## ABSTRACT

Dialogue is an ideal setting for changing linguistic representations thanks to the repeated use of new words and meanings. Two experiments were conducted to examine the extent to which new semantic relationships created during dialogue may change preexisting representations in long-term semantic memory after a dialogue. For this purpose, we developed an interactive agreement referential task to create new semantic relationships in dialogue between two words by associating them to a single picture. One day after the dialogue phase, participants performed either a lexical decision task associated to a semantic priming paradigm (Experiment 1), or a semantic relatedness judgment task (Experiment 2). In both tasks, the participants' performance was collected during the processing of pairs of words referring either to the same picture or to different pictures during the dialogue phase in order to assess changes in long-term semantic representations after the dialogue phase. No significant effect of relatedness due to the creation of new semantic relationships during dialogue was found in the lexical decision task. However, when the participants' attention was focused on semantic relationships during the semantic relatedness judgment task, which required participants to perform an explicit judgment, newly related words were rated as more related semantically. The two experiments bear important implications for understanding on the links between dialogue and the updating of long-term semantic representations.

## 1. Introduction

Dialogue is a joint activity involving at least two partners who interact using language to reach a common goal (e.g., choosing the hour of a meeting or the destination of a trip). This daily activity requires the partners to coordinate the timing and content of their conversation to ensure easy and efficient communication and understand each other (Clark, 1996; Clark & Brennan, 1991; Pickering & Garrod, 2004, 2021; Sacks et al., 1974). According to the collaborative approach to dialogue, partners attempt to minimize the effort put into dialogue by producing utterances designed to their interlocutor to reach mutual understanding (Clark, 1996; Clark & Brennan, 1991; Clark & Schaefer, 1989; Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986; Nault et al., 2023). For instance, they attempt to favor the production of words and utterances which are easily understandable for their current partner (Clark & Murphy, 1982; Yoon & Brown-Schmidt, 2019). The implications of this process, referred to as audience design, are twofold. First, partners tend to reuse the same

words or expressions to refer repeatedly to the same objects throughout the conversation in order to improve mutual understanding (Brennan & Clark, 1996; Clark, 1996). Second, the production of some words may result in the emergence of new uses for known words such that new word-meaning mappings can emerge during dialogue. Dialogue thus constitutes an ideal setting to integrate new uses for known words and new meanings into long-term memory. A key question concerning the interface between memory and language is understanding to what extent new semantic relationships created during dialogue change pre-existing lexico-semantic representations in long-term memory after a dialogue. We address this question in the present study.

For instance, during a dialogue, if speakers A and B agree on the use of the word 'anchor' to refer to the abstract picture (i.e., tangram picture) shown in Fig. 1, a new mapping between this picture and the word 'anchor' may be created in A and B's memory representations, implying that the word "anchor" has acquired a new meaning due to the visual representation this word is now associated with. Studies involving a

<footnote><sup>a</sup> Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 9193 - SCALab - Sciences Cognitives et Sciences Affectives, F-59000 Lille, France</footnote>

<footnote><sup>b</sup> Laboratoire DysCo, Université Paris 8, Saint-Denis, France</footnote>

<footnote><sup>c</sup> Univ. Lille, Inria, CNRS, Centrale Lille, UMR 9189 - CRISTAL, F-59000 Lille, France</footnote>

<footnote>* Corresponding authors at: SCALab, CNRS UMR 9193, Université de Lille, Domaine Universitaire du Pont de Bois, BP 60149, 59653 Villeneuve d'Ascq, France. E-mail addresses: fasquel.a.97@gmail.com (A. Fasquel), angele.brunelliere@univ-lille.fr (A. Brunellière).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 1.** Example of a tangram picture used in this study. This example could be referred to as an “anchor”.</figcaption></figure>

referential communication task showed that once speakers A and B found an agreement on the best reference to use, they tend to reuse the same word serving as a referential label throughout the conversation and during subsequent interactions (Brennan & Clark, 1996; Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986; Metzing & Brennan, 2003).

According to the collaborative approach to dialogue (Clark, 1996), agreements between conversational partners on how to refer to an object, a person or an entity are temporarily stored in the common ground and are defined as conceptual pacts (Brennan & Clark, 1996). From a cognitive point of view, dialogue partners establishing conceptual pacts implies that they store information produced during dialogue as traces in memory, and that they are capable of rapidly accessing such traces during subsequent interactions. Research conducted as part of the memory-based approach to dialogue has already explored what people reuse or remember from past dialogues, how cues present at the time of the initial dialogue may impact subsequent information retrieval from the common ground, and the nature of the cognitive processes that support information encoding and retrieval during dialogue (Horton & Gerrig, 2002, 2005a, 2005b, 2016; Nault et al., 2023). However, it remains to be understood how dialogue may affect people's preexisting representations stored in memory, such that new word-meaning mappings produce changes in lexico-semantic representations after dialogue.

Lexico-semantic representations are often conceptualized as a network of highly interconnected nodes that can be activated in order to retrieve the meanings of words (Collins & Loftus, 1975; Collins & Quillian, 1969). Although the exact organization of lexico-semantic representations is still under debate (see Hutchison, 2003; Kumar, 2021; Lucas, 2000; McNamara, 2005; Neely, 1991), the usual consensus is that the number of interconnections between them defines their degree of relatedness in a lexico-semantic network (Anderson, 1983; Collins & Loftus, 1975; Farah & McClelland, 1991; McRae et al., 1997; Plaut & Booth, 2000). The interactive alignment model of Pickering and Garrod (2004, 2021) provides interesting proposals on the way in which dialogue might affect preexisting lexico-semantic representations stored in memory. This model indeed suggests that A and B's pre-existing linguistic representations are modified *during* dialogue. While the model does not draw any conclusion as to the changes of linguistic representations *after* dialogue, it assumes that an increase of activation at the representational level occurs as the interaction unfolds. We hypothesize

that such increase in the degree of activation at the representational level *during* dialogue affects the organization of linguistic representations *after* dialogue. In other terms, preexisting lexico-semantic representations stored in memory might change after a dialogue phase due to variations in the degree of activation at the representational level through the lexico-semantic network during dialogue.

Interestingly, empirical evidences of changes in lexico-semantic representations already exist in non-dialogic settings (e.g., Fang & Perfetti, 2019; Maciejewski et al., 2020; Rodd et al., 2012). The organization of the lexico-semantic network is thus considered as dynamic in that the interconnections into the network can change depending on the exposure to different linguistic inputs. For instance, the integration of new meanings for known words in the lexico-semantic network was shown to impact the retrieval of pre-existing meanings (e.g., Fang & Perfetti, 2019; Maciejewski et al., 2020; Rodd et al., 2012; see also Kumar, 2021 for a review). In their study, Rodd et al. (2012) explored the learning of new meanings for existing words by reading short paragraphs in which a new definition was given to an existing word. During the learning phase, they manipulated the relatedness of the new meaning in relation to the original meaning of the word. The results showed that participants were able to recall the new properties of all the new words, showing that new word-meaning mappings were learned. For example, participants had to learn that a “widow” (an already existing word) was “an animal that is forced out of its group”, which constitutes one among five properties of the new meaning attributed to the word. In addition, novel meanings that were related to the original ones were easier to recall than unrelated novel meanings, indicating that the new meaning was integrated enough to interact with pre-existing lexico-semantic representations. Similar patterns of integration of new word-meaning mappings in the lexico-semantic network have also been found using spoken material (Rodd et al., 2013, 2016), but also without explicitly asking participants to learn the new meanings (i.e., incidental learning, Hulme et al., 2019). Moreover, using the word-meaning priming paradigm in which participants were exposed to polysemous words in their subordinate meaning context, Gaskell et al. (2019) showed a significantly stronger retrieval of the primed meaning for participants who benefited from a period of sleep than for those who did not. This result was consistent with the idea that changes in the lexico-semantic representations found immediately after the exposure to new linguistic inputs tend to be boosted by sleep and offline consolidation.

While research on the impact of new linguistic inputs on the adaptation of lexico-semantic representations seems to converge on the idea that these representations can be changed, studies have always been conducted in non-interactive settings and the majority of these studies used assessment tasks involving word production (i.e., word association task or cued recall task), or an explicit focus on the semantic properties of the words. Therefore, beyond the question of generalizability of the results to dialogic settings, the literature points to the question of accessing lexico-semantic representations in terms of their activation and the nature of the changes observed in the lexico-semantic network. Although changes in preexisting lexico-semantic representations could be associated with the establishment of rapid strong connections into the lexico-semantic network, new weak yet reachable connections into the lexico-semantic network could be formed and their access would be under the action of attentional processes. As proposed by Dehaene et al. (2006), top-down attention acts by amplifying the degree of activation into networks of interconnected nodes. Thus, an explicit attentional focus on the new semantic connections into the lexico-semantic network, also known as semantic control processes, may facilitate their access by shaping activations in the semantic system (Reilly et al., 2025). If new weak yet reachable connections would be formed, top-down attention on the semantic properties would be thus required to observe changes in accessing lexico-semantic representations.

The present study seeks to better understand to what extent dialogue can change pre-existing lexico-semantic representations in long term memory. More precisely, we examined whether and how the creation of
a new semantic relationship between pairs of words referring to a single picture in dialogue can impact long-term semantic representations such that their access changed one day after dialogue. To this aim, we developed a new methodological approach combining an interactive task and various tasks assessing the activation of lexico-semantic representations in long term memory after a dialogue. We created a new experimental paradigm in dialogue that we called the interactive agreement referential task (IAR) during which partners interact via an audio-conference device to reach an agreement on how to name tangram pictures presented on their screens. This task allows participants to create new semantic relationships between two words by taking advantage of the new visual representation they share (as illustrated in Fig. 2; e.g., ‘anchor’ and ‘hat’ referring to the same tangram picture).

Our hypothesis was that a new semantic relationship would be created between pairs of words referring to a shared visual representation but not between pairs of words referring to two distinct visual representations during dialogue. Furthermore, this new relationship should change the access to lexico-semantic representations after dialogue. To investigate the nature of changes in accessing lexico-semantic representations due to the creation of a new semantic relationship, we conducted two experiments involving the interactive agreement referential task. In Experiment 1, we investigated the access to long-term semantic representations with an implicit method by which we can track the strength of activation into the lexico-semantic network without attentional focus on semantic relationships between words. We used a visual lexical decision task coupled with a semantic priming paradigm one day after dialogue. In Experiment 2, we explicitly led the participants to pay attention to the semantic relationship between pairs of words by using a semantic relatedness judgment task one day after dialogue. Thanks to this task, we explored whether changes in pre-existing lexico-semantic representations were related to new weak yet reachable connections into the lexico-semantic network under the action of attentional processes, by amplifying the degree of activation into the network.

## 1.1. Experiment 1

Experiment 1 aimed at investigating the possibility that a new semantic relationship created during dialogue may be sufficiently integrated in the lexico-semantic network to be accessed through implicit measures one day after dialogue. During dialogue, partners had to suggest words to refer to abstract pictures and justify their choices to the other person. They then had to reach an agreement on their choices of words (see Fig. 2). The creation of the new semantic relationship during dialogue was ensured by the presence of a confederate in place of a naïve conversational partner, who followed a script to associate pairs of words with a shared visual representation, while keeping the interaction as naturalistic as possible. The scripts were also designed to allow the repetitions of the pairs of words together with their shared visual representation, in line with the study by Betts et al. (2018) showing a boost of changes in lexico-semantic representations after three repetitions when their presentations were spaced out. Crucially, the order of presentation of each word of pairs referring to shared visual representations was changed after each repetition in order to help the creation of new relationships and changes in preexisting representations which are lexico-semantic in nature. In the same vein, the modality through which words were conveyed during the dialogue phase (i.e., the auditory modality) was different from the one in which the access to the lexico-semantic representations was assessed one day after the dialogue phase (i.e., written modality). This modality difference is crucial to prevent an interpretation of our results in terms of episodic priming.

In the lexical decision task coupled with a semantic priming paradigm, we expected faster reaction times for pairs of words referring to the same visual representation than for pairs of words referring to distinct visual representations, corresponding to an effect of relatedness. At the end of each experiment, two questionnaires were added as exploratory measures: the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI)

questionnaire as a measure of empathy (Braun et al., 2015) and the Plymouth Sensory Imagery Questionnaire-French to assess mental imagery abilities (PSIQ-F; Ceschi & Pictet, 2018). The questionnaires were used to evaluate a potential impact of empathy and mental imagery on the changes of lexico-semantic representations after the dialogue phase.

# 2. Materials and methods of Experiment 1

## 2.1. Participants

Forty-two native French speakers (37 females; 40 undergraduates and two community members; age, *M* = 22.26, *SD* = 3.64) were paid 15€ to take part in the experiment. All participants had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and no history of language disorder, auditory disorder or neurological disorder. They signed an informed consent form before the beginning of the experiment and were fully debriefed after the experiment. This work was approved by an Ethics Committee (reference: 2021-512-S95). Two participants were excluded from the analysis of data (for more details, see the experimental design and data preprocessing section).

During the dialogue phase, participants interacted with one of the two confederates of this experiment. Both were native French speaking women aged of 24 and 25 years old and had no history of language disorder, auditory disorder or neurological disorder. More precisely, half of the participants interacted with one of the confederates while the other half interacted with the other confederate.

## 2.2. Stimuli

### 2.2.1. The interactive agreement referential task (IAR)

One-hundred-and-ten tangram pictures were selected from the Fasquel et al. (2023) tangram picture database, leading to two sets of pictures and their associated words. They were discussed by the confederate. Set 1 was created to constitute the pairs of words associated with a shared picture and Set 2 was created to constitute the pairs of words associated with distinct pictures.

Set 1 was constituted of 40 tangram pictures, all associated with two plausible referential labels (i.e., words proposed by at least 4 participants) which were not semantically related before dialogue (e.g., ‘anchor’ and ‘hat’). All selected words were nouns and their psycholinguistic properties are reported in Table 1. The degree of relatedness between each pair of words was pre-tested by 29 other native French speakers on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = not related at all, 7 = strongly related). The mean relatedness was 1.75 (*SD* = 0.71) and each pair was rated below 4, meaning that they were all considered as semantically unrelated.

Set 2 was constituted of 40 tangram pictures which were not already present in Set 1 and they were associated with only one word by the confederate. Each word had to be proposed at least once by their associated picture in the databases<fnref n="1" /> to be considered as being a plausible referential label. Crucially, for a picture to be selected, its referential label had to be one word among the pairs selected in Set 1 in order to create the pairs of words referring to two distinct visual representations. As in Set 1, all selected words were nouns.

<footnote n="1">¹ As the Fasquel et al. (2023) database contains both words and expressions for each picture, and given that the current experiment required only isolated words as labels, a pre-selection of 148 pictures was made for which 84 French native speakers proposed only isolated words as labels. The pictures selected for each of the 3 sets were thus associated with either words from this new database or words from the original database of 332 tangram pictures if the picture was already associated with a satisfactory amount of isolated words in it. The whole new database of 148 pictures and their associated words is available at the following url, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10419752.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 2.** Adapted illustration of the IAR task. A: example of two words proposed to name the picture in order to create a new semantic relationship between the two words (blue arrow). B: illustration of the three steps of the IAR task. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)</figcaption></figure>

<caption>**Table 1**</caption>

Psycholinguistic properties of primes and targets for experimental lists 1 and 2 separately, Experiment 1.

<table><thead><tr><th rowspan="2"></th><th rowspan="2"></th><th colspan="2">Lexical frequency</th><th colspan="2">Number of letters</th><th colspan="2">Number of phonemes</th><th colspan="2">Number of orthographic neighbors</th><th colspan="2">Number of phonological neighbors</th></tr><tr><th>Mean</th><th>SD</th><th>Mean</th><th>SD</th><th>Mean</th><th>SD</th><th>Mean</th><th>SD</th><th>Mean</th><th>SD</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td rowspan="2">List 1</td><td>Primes</td><td>45.40</td><td>88.84</td><td>5.90</td><td>1.59</td><td>4.40</td><td>1.43</td><td>3.10</td><td>3.18</td><td>6.60</td><td>7.17</td></tr><tr><td>Targets</td><td>28.08</td><td>44.07</td><td>6.20</td><td>1.20</td><td>4.60</td><td>1.27</td><td>3.20</td><td>4.40</td><td>9.75</td><td>10.40</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="2">List 2</td><td>Primes</td><td>50.40</td><td>129.17</td><td>6.10</td><td>1.52</td><td>4.40</td><td>1.31</td><td>4.60</td><td>6.42</td><td>8.45</td><td>9.13</td></tr><tr><td>Targets</td><td>30.78</td><td>45.65</td><td>6.20</td><td>1.77</td><td>4.60</td><td>1.53</td><td>3.60</td><td>5.43</td><td>9.15</td><td>8.62</td></tr></tbody></table>

Note. All properties were extracted from New et al. (2004); lexical frequency was based on movie subtitle corpora.

2.2.1.1. **Experimental lists.** Pairs of words from Set 1 were presented in one of two experimental conditions (related versus unrelated conditions). In the related condition, words were associated with the same tangram picture during dialogue and all pictures came from Set 1. In the unrelated condition, words were associated with two different tangram pictures during dialogue: one with its tangram picture from Set 1, the other with its tangram picture from Set 2. This manipulation was administered within-participants, such that all participants were exposed to both kinds of word pairs during the experiment. To prevent any repetition of words or pictures within participants, we created two experimental lists. Each list included 20 tangram pictures associated with a pair of words and 40 different tangram pictures associated with a single word.

2.2.1.2. **Filler set.** An additional set of filler pictures and their possible referential labels was also created to be discussed by the participants in order to keep them involved in the task. This additional set was constituted of 30 tangram pictures associated with words that were absent from Sets 1 and 2. These pictures came from the Fasquel et al. (2023) database and their two most frequent words in the database were selected as referential labels. Contrary to Sets 1 and 2, the words could either be nouns or verbs and each pair of words associated with a picture could either be semantically related or not.

2.2.1.3. **Design.** In each experimental trial, the pictures were presented in groups of three, resulting in 20 trials (three pictures per trial x 20 trials = 60 pictures). Two different presentation orders of the pictures within the experimental trials were created. Because there were two experimental lists, this meant that four different versions of the task were made (two experimental lists x two presentation orders). There were also ten filler trials. These filler trials included the 30 filler pictures described by the participant. Contrary to the experimental trials, groups of pictures were kept constant across the four versions of the task for filler trials (see Appendix A).

### 2.2.2. The lexical decision task (LDT)

All words used as referential labels in the Sets 1 and 2 of the IAR task were included in the LDT to form the two experimental conditions

(related versus unrelated): the 20 pairs of words each associated with a shared picture in the IAR task were used as related pairs of words; while the 40 words which were each associated with a distinct picture in the IAR task were paired to constitute the 20 unrelated pairs of words. The same two experimental lists as in the IAR task made it possible to present the word pairs either in the related condition or in the unrelated condition in the LDT across the participants. The properties of primes and targets used in the two experimental conditions were matched in terms of frequency, length and neighbourhood between the two experimental lists (see Table 1). Due to the written presentation of words in the lexical decision task, we also ensured that each word did not exceed a length of 10 letters (range: 3–10 letters). Word pairs were also matched in terms of semantic relatedness and co-occurrence frequency between the two experimental lists (semantic relatedness: list 1, *M* = 1.75, *SD* = 0.83, list 2, *M* = 1.76, *SD* = 0.58; co-occurrence frequency: list 1, *M* = 0.35, *SD* = 0.93, list 2, *M* = 0.95, *SD* = 3.56). The co-occurrence frequency, corresponding to the statistical regularities of co-occurrence of two words in large language corpora, was calculated with the same approach used in Brunellière et al. (2017) and in Brunellière and Bonnotte (2018). While these criteria were specific needs for the lexical decision task, they also conditioned the creation of the two experimental lists for the IAR task.

Eighty filler words were also added to form filler pairs of words which were unrelated pairs of familiar nouns and 80 word-pseudoword pairs were finally added. Importantly, 40 words selected as primes of word-pseudoword pairs were produced in the IAR task to prevent the development of strategies on the repetition of words between the IAR and the LDT that participants could use to make their lexical decision on the targets. Pseudoword targets were orthographically legal and were constructed by replacing a letter in French words. Word and pseudoword targets were matched in length (number of letters, for words: *M* = 6.76, *SD* = 1.68; for pseudowords: *M* = 7.18, *SD* = 1.57).

### 2.3. Procedure

Experiment 1 took place on two consecutive days (see Fig. 3). While session 1 corresponded to the tasks performed during day 1 (i.e., interactive agreement referential task: IAR, and filler task), session 2
consisted of tasks performed on day 2 (i.e., lexical decision task: LDT, and questionnaires). Both sessions were performed in the same testing room and the overall experiment lasted around two and a half hours.

### 2.3.1. Session 1

#### 2.3.1.1. Interactive agreement referential task (IAR)
Before their arrival, participants were randomly assigned to one of the four versions of the IAR task. On day 1, the participant and the confederate were placed in two separate rooms. In that manner, the confederate read the scripts as naturally as possible during the interaction, without being seen by the participant. The participant was informed that they would have to interact with another participant installed in another room using an audio-conference device and a headphone, and that the discussion would be recorded for the purpose of the experiment. They were also informed that, for the whole interaction they would be named "participant B" and that they will see the same pictures than the other person, named "participant A". The purpose was to reinforce the participant's impression that the confederate was also a naïve participant. The picture presentation was run on the computer screen using GNU Octave (version 6.4.0) and the dialogues were recorded using a Zoom H4n with a dual-entry digital recorder (one per partner).

The IAR task was divided into 30 trials and a break was given to the participant after 15 trials. Each trial began with the instruction of which of the participant or the confederate had to propose words for the following pictures. The instruction was displayed on both the screen of the participant and the one of the confederates, and it was then followed by the presentation of three tangram pictures side by side (see Fig. 4). The instruction was divided into three steps (see Fig. 2). The first step (i.e., naming step) was to choose one or two words for each of the three pictures displayed on the screen. More precisely, the person proposing the words on that trial had to choose words among a list of six possible words and to write their choices on a response sheet before giving the choices of words. When the words chosen to refer to each of the three tangram pictures had been provided, the partners went to the second step (i.e., justification step) and the person who had chosen the words had to justify their choices (i.e., to what extent the picture reminds them

of the proposed word) for the three pictures. The last step (i.e., agreement step) was to ask the partner if they agreed on the proposed words and write the partner's answer on the response sheet. Thanks to this structure, the two partners were able to reach an agreement rapidly and explicitly. When the trial ended, the confederate pressed the space bar to start the next trial and to control the transition between trials, while the participant was informed that transitions were managed by the experimenter. In order to familiarize the partners with the procedure, a training phase was composed of one trial with words given by the confederate, followed by one trial with words proposed by the participant.

For the twenty experimental trials, the confederate had to propose the words to refer to the tangram pictures. Each version of the IAR task was associated with one script and the structure of the four scripts was always the same, and only the picture's word and its descriptions changed. The scripts followed the same rules as those given to the participant on how to proceed when naming the pictures. First, the confederate proposed the words associated with each picture (see the design section for more details on the choices of words). When a picture was associated with a pair of words, these words were placed within a window of 10 words in the same sentence (see Brunellière et al., 2017, for justification). Words given to different pictures within the same trial were spaced by at least 10 words, such that the participant would have no doubt about the choice of words for a given picture. To do so, sentences which did not contain any picture's referential label such as "I think that's the best word", could be placed after each sentence containing one. After the picture-naming step, the confederate had to argue the choices of words in relation to the picture. During this justification step, the words associated with each picture were repeated a second time and the picture was described using its geometrical shapes and global shape. The next step was for the confederate to ask the participants whether they agreed or not with the suggested words. Note that the mean percentage of disagreement given by the participants to the words proposed by the confederates was 5.67 % (SD = 4.60), showing that the participants easily reached an agreement with the confederates. If two words were proposed for a given picture, the partner had to agree on both words to make it an "agreement" answer. Moreover, if the

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 3.** Recap of the procedure of the two experiments. IRI: Interpersonal Reactivity Index questionnaire; PSIQ-F: Plymouth Sensory Imagery Questionnaire in French.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 4.** Schematic representation of an experimental trial. The confederate and the participant saw the same three pictures and the confederate had to name them using either one or two words.</figcaption></figure>
participant disagreed on at least one of the two words when they were proposed to refer to the same picture by the confederate, this counted as a disagreement. The experimenter did not provide any feedback or make any comments if a disagreement occurred. In addition, the agreement step allowed the confederate to repeat a third and a fourth time the words associated to the pictures.<fnref n="2" /> The third repetition was to ask for the agreement and the fourth one to confirm that the decision had been written on the response sheet. Therefore, each of the four repetitions was spaced through the different turn-takings during the three steps. Importantly, when two words were proposed for a given picture, the order of presentation of the words of the same pair was alternated along the script.

For the ten filler trials, participants had to propose words to refer to tangram pictures (i.e., the 30 pictures from set 3). Half of these trials were presented in each block (five per block of 15 trials). The purpose of these trials was to encourage the participant to actively engage in the task (rather than simply listening to the confederate). The data from these filler trials were not analyzed further. To keep the interaction as naturalistic as possible, the confederate was allowed to choose the trial to disagree on to match with the relevance of the participant's justifications. The number of disagreements given by the confederate on the words proposed by the participant was kept constant across participants to one trial per block.

2.3.1.2. Filler task. After the IAR task, participants performed a filler task. It consisted in an online citizen-science experiment designed by researchers at Yale University, called the Tone Deafness Test (see https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td). In this task, participants had to listen to sounds of different pitches and indicate whether the last sound went up or down. They were also asked questions regarding their experiences with music.

## 2.3.2. Session 2

2.3.2.1. Lexical decision task (LDT) and questionnaires. Participants came back the following day to perform an individual lexical decision task associated with a semantic priming paradigm and fill in self-assessment questionnaires on personal abilities (i.e., empathy and mental imagery). Concerning the lexical decision task, stimuli were presented using the E-Prime software (E-Prime 2.0.10.356, Schneider et al., 2002a, 2002b). Participants first performed 16 practice trials before proceeding with the 160 experimental trials corresponding to the experimental list attributed to them before the IAR task. The trials were divided into two blocks of 80 trials and a break between the blocks was proposed to participants. Stimuli were displayed on the screen in lower case and in white font against a black background. Each trial consisted in the presentation of a fixation cross for 500 ms, followed by a prime word for 150 ms. A black screen was then displayed for 16 ms (leading to a SOA of 166 ms) before the presentation of the target stimulus, which remained on the screen until the participant's response. Participants had to indicate as quickly and accurately as possible whether or not the target stimulus was a real word. They had to respond by using a button box for which the assignment of the button responses depended on their handedness. At the end of each trial, a black screen was displayed for 1500 ms before the next trial began. The task took approximately 15 min to be completed.

Regarding the questionnaires, participants were asked to fill in the IRI questionnaire (Braun et al., 2015) as a measure of cognitive and affective empathy, and the PSIQ-F questionnaire (Ceschi & Pictet, 2018)

as a measure of mental imagery. Both questionnaires were implemented on LimeSurvey 2.06. Regarding the IRI questionnaire, we hypothesized that empathy could play a role in the changes of lexico-semantic representations after dialogue, because Gandolfi et al. (2023) proposed that social cognition must be considered in the process of building altered representations during dialogue, by which individuals would use their abilities to infer their interlocutors' points of view. People with higher empathy scores could display more changes in lexico-semantic representations. Concerning the PSIQ-F questionnaire, we wanted to examine whether mental imagery affected our results, such that participants with higher mental imagery scores would display more changes in lexico-semantic representations. This exploratory hypothesis rests on the description of processes underlying mental imagery, among which the capacity to create and transform mental representations is a crucial part of those processes (Guarnera et al., 2019; Kosslyn, 1999). At the end of these questionnaires, participants answered two additional questions in order to determine if they were aware of the presence of a confederate. None of the participants spontaneously reported being aware of the presence of a confederate in the first question. In the second question, none of the participants reported being aware of the confederate due to the dialogue feeling unnatural.

## 2.4. Data analysis

### 2.4.1. Data pre-processing

Cut-offs were used to exclude outliers. First, the data from two participants were excluded from the analyses due to a total response accuracy below 90 %. This cut-off was chosen to minimize the number of missing data per condition. The data from 40 participants were analyzed. This sample size is in line with previous studies that used the lexical decision task as a measure of the relatedness between pairs of written words (Armstrong & Plaut, 2008; Brunellière et al., 2017; Shelton & Martin, 1992). Regarding the reaction times of the 40 remaining participants, incorrect responses (0.83 %) and decision latencies longer than 1513 ms (5 SD above the grand mean, for a similar approach, see Baayen et al., 2003) were excluded (0.50 %). The mean error rates for the related and unrelated conditions were 1.19 % and 0.48 % respectively. As our hypotheses did not concern error rates and as they were below the 5 % threshold, no statistical analysis was conducted on them. Trials where participants expressed a disagreement and trials where confederates did not manage to produce the 4 repetitions were not excluded from the statistical analyses.

### 2.4.2. Statistical analyses

Reaction times from the lexical decision task were analyzed with linear mixed-effects models using lme4 package in R (Baayen et al., 2008). The dependent variable was the participants' reaction times on the lexical decision task. The independent variable, called the relatedness factor, was whether each pair of words shown in the lexical decision task was made of words which were both used to refer to the same picture (i.e., related condition) or which were used to refer to different pictures (i.e., unrelated condition) during dialogue. As in Barr et al. (2013), we started by implementing the maximal random effect structure justified by the design. This involved by-participant random intercepts, by-participant random slopes corresponding to relatedness, by-item random intercepts and by-item random slopes corresponding to the relatedness factor (note that in the present study, items corresponded to the target words of each pair on which participants made their lexical decision). However, models including this maximal random effect structure systematically failed to converge. We thus attempted to simplify the structure of the models in order to improve model convergence, and we found that the only model to converge was a model including only by-participant and by-item random intercepts. The fixed effect remained as planned with the relatedness of the pair of words during the dialogue phase which was divided into two experimental conditions (related, or unrelated condition).

<footnote n="2">² The recordings of the dialogues were checked to make sure that words were correctly repeated four times by the confederate. The mean number of repetitions of the words referring to pictures by the confederate approached four ($M = 3.98, SD = 0.24$), confirming that the required repetitions were produced by the confederate.</footnote>
Two additional exploratory analyses were conducted to investigate effects of empathy and mental imagery (assessed respectively by the IRI or the PSIQ-F questionnaire) on the changes in lexico-semantic representations after the dialogue phase. These models both included by-participant and by-item random intercepts, following the same ratio-nale as the main model. The first model included both the relatedness factor and the centred data for each dimension of the IRI questionnaire as fixed effects (Personal Distress, Perspective Taking, Empathic Concern and Fantasy). Centring the data around the mean for each dimension allowed to reduce the risk of multicollinearity. The second model also included the relatedness factor as fixed effect, as well as centred data for each dimension of the PSIQ-F as fixed effects (Vision, Sound, Smell, Taste, Touch, Body and Emotion).

## 3. Results of Experiment 1

The results from the main models of Experiment 1 are reported in Table 2 and illustrated in Fig. 5. There was no significant difference found between pairs of words referring to the same picture during dialogue (M = 615 ms, SD = 152 ms) and those referring to different pictures during dialogue (M = 615 ms, SD = 164 ms), b = -4.72, SE = 6.55, χ²(1) = 0.52, p = .47. Regarding the exploratory models that included either the IRI or the PSIQ-F questionnaire, no interaction effect was found with the relatedness factor on the lexical decision latencies (see Appendix B).

A supplementary analysis was conducted in order to investigate further the effect of a night of sleep on potential changes in the participants' lexico-semantic network. The detail of this analysis is provided in Appendix B. In this analysis, we included the time of day at which each participant performed the first session of the experiment as an additional fixed effect in the model. Just like in the main analysis, the model also included relatedness as a fixed effect (as well as the interaction between relatedness and participation time); the outcome variable was the participant's reaction time on the lexical decision task. Indeed, dyads performing the first session at different times of the day meant that their awakening time before going to sleep on the night following the first session varied across dyads. However, no significant effect of participation time was found, nor did this factor interact with relatedness; these results are therefore not discussed further in the remainder of this paper.

## 4. Discussion of Experiment 1

In Experiment 1, we explored whether a new semantic relationship created during dialogue may be sufficiently integrated in the lexico-semantic network to be accessed through implicit measures one day after dialogue. The discussion on tangram pictures to reach an agreement on the best word to give to each picture offers an opportunity to create a new semantic relationship between the words mapped with the same visual representation. One day later, participants performed a lexical decision task coupled with a semantic priming paradigm. The aim of this task was to identify the existence of strong connections in the lexico-semantic network by implicitly accessing the new lexico-semantic

<table><caption>**Table 2**
Fixed and random effects, Experiment 1.</caption><thead><tr><th>Fixed effect</th><th>χ<sup>2</sup></th><th>DF</th><th>b</th><th>SE</th><th>p</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Relatedness_factor</td><td>0.52</td><td>1</td><td>-4.72</td><td>6.55</td><td>0.47</td></tr></tbody></table><table><thead><tr><th>Random effects</th><th>Variance</th><th>SD</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Participant</td><td>6563</td><td>81.01</td></tr><tr><td>Target</td><td>1688</td><td>41.09</td></tr><tr><td>Residual</td><td>16,914</td><td>130.05</td></tr></tbody></table>

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 5.** Reaction times as a function of the relatedness factor in Experiment 1. Note. Vertical bars correspond to standard deviation.</figcaption></figure>

relationship. This implicit aspect was also ensured by the use of short presentation interval time (usually called stimulus onset asynchrony between pairs of stimuli, SOA), thus reducing the development of attentional processes (Neely, 1977). We expected to find a relatedness effect with faster reaction times with pairs related referring to the same picture during dialogue than with pairs referring to two different pictures. The analysis of the data in the lexical decision task did not reveal any significant relatedness effect nor any interaction between relatedness factor and the various subscales of the IRI and PSIQ-F questionnaires. From these results, we cannot conclude about any changes in pre-existing lexico-semantic representations after one night of sleep using implicit measures.

In line with the aim of this study, we conducted a second experiment to address whether changes into the lexico-semantic network could be found under the action of attentional processes by using an explicit task on the degree of relatedness. Contrary to an implicit task such as a lexical decision task which would ensure access to stronger connections into the lexico-semantic network, the use of the semantic relatedness judgment task would amplify the activation of the lexico-semantic network and help to track weaker connections into the lexico-semantic network.

### 4.1. Experiment 2

Experiment 2 followed a similar procedure to that of Experiment 1, except that the visual lexical decision task was replaced by a visual semantic relatedness judgment task, during which participants must explicitly pay attention to the degree of relatedness between pairs of written words. We explored whether changes in preexisting lexico-semantic representations one day after were present when attentional processes could amplify the degree of activation into the lexico-semantic network. One day after dialogue, we expected higher scores of semantic relatedness for pairs of words referring to the same tangram picture during the dialogue phase than for pairs of words referring to two
different tangram pictures during the dialogue phase. Crucially, a con-
trol group was also added in Experiment 2 to provide clear evidence that
dialogue directly changes preexisting lexico-semantic representations.
This group was not exposed to dialogue. A significant interaction be-
tween relatedness (related vs. unrelated condition) and group (group
exposed to the dialogue vs. control group) was therefore expected to be
found. Contrary to the group exposed to dialogue (i.e., experimental
group), we expected that the scores of semantic relatedness for pairs of
words referring to the same tangram picture did not differ with those
referring to two different tangram pictures in the control group. In
addition, both groups were asked to perform a word-picture relatedness
judgment task as a control task to ensure that the participants had
learned the associations between each of the two words used to refer to
the same picture during dialogue (i.e., the IAR task) and their associated
picture.

# 5. Materials and methods of Experiment 2

5.1. Participants

Forty French native speaking students (all undergraduates; 33 fe-
males; age, M = 20.50, SD = 2.43) were paid 15€ to be a part of the
experimental group (i.e., group exposed to dialogue). The recruitment
procedure was the same as for Experiment 1. As in Experiment 1, par-
ticipants interacted with one of the two same confederates. More pre-
cisely, 21 participants interacted with one of the confederates while 19
participants interacted with the other one. One additional participant
was excluded from the analysis of data (for more details, see the
experimental design and data pre-processing section). For the control
group, forty native French speakers (33 females; age, M = 21.15, SD =
2.25) were recruited via prolific and social media. Participants in the
control group, who performed only the semantic relatedness judgment
and word-picture relatedness judgment tasks, were paid 5€ for their
participation.

5.2. Stimuli

The stimuli in the IAR task were the same as those in Experiment 1.
As in the lexical decision task of Experiment 1, all referential labels used
in Set 1 in the IAR task were selected for the relatedness judgment task
and the word-picture relatedness judgment task of Experiment 2. Stimuli
for the word-picture relatedness judgment task also included the 40
tangram pictures from Set 1. Finally, additional pairs of stimuli were
selected to make sure that the participants would use all the points on
the Likert scales in each task.

5.2.1. Semantic relatedness judgment task

In addition to the pairs of words from the IAR task, twenty highly
semantically related pairs of words were selected from the stimuli of
*Brunellière and Bonnotte (2018)*. Their mean semantic relatedness score
was 6.47 on a 7-point scale (SD = 0.58) from the study of *Brunellière and
*Bonnotte (2018)*.

5.2.2. Word-picture relatedness judgment task

Sixty new words were selected to be paired with tangram pictures
used in the IAR task. None of these 60 new word-picture pairs were
presented during the dialogue phase. Forty of the new words were
selected from the Fasquel et al. (2023) database as ‘weakly plausible
names’<fnref n="3" /> for each of the 40 tangram pictures, and allowed participants to
use the middle of the Likert scale. The 20 remaining words were filler
words from the semantic relatedness judgment task, selected for being
not related at all to any of the tangram pictures (as attested by their

absence in the Fasquel et al., 2023 database). These words were thus
selected to create unrelated word-picture pairs.

5.3. Design

The same two experimental lists as in Experiment 1 were used for the
IAR task of Experiment 2.

5.3.1. Semantic relatedness judgment task (SRJ)

The two experimental lists made it possible to present word pairs
either in the related condition (20 pairs of words referring to the same
tangram picture) or in the unrelated condition (20 pairs of words
referring to different tangram pictures). In addition, the 20 highly
semantically related pairs of words were presented in both lists. The
mean lexical frequency and mean number of letters of these 20 highly
semantically related pairs were matched with those of the two other
experimental conditions across the experimental lists (see Table 3 for
more details on the psycholinguistic properties). In total, 60 trials were
performed in the semantic relatedness judgment task.

5.3.2. Word-picture relatedness judgment task (W-PRJ)

The 20 pictures associated with pairs of words during the IAR task
were presented twice, each time using one of the two words with which
it had been associated during the dialogue phase. The 20 remaining
pictures from Set 1 were also presented twice during the task, once with
its ‘weakly plausible name’ and once with a filler word from the SRJ
task. In total, two sets of 40 word-picture pairs were presented to the
participants giving rise to 80 trials. The words included in these sets
were matched in terms of lexical frequency and mean number of letters
(see Table 4 for more details on the psycholinguistic properties).

5.4. Procedure

5.4.1. *Experimental group*

5.4.1.1. *Session 1.* The procedure for day 1 was the same as in Experiment 1, with participants performing the IAR task first and then the Tone Deafness Test. The mean number of repetitions of the words produced by the confederate approached 4 (M = 3.99, SD = 0.17), confirming that the required repetitions were produced by the confederate despite the naturalistic setting of the task. Regarding the level of disagreement provided by the participant on the words proposed by the confederate, the mean percentage was 5.92 % (SD = 4.67). As in Experiment 1, an agreement was thus reached easily.

5.4.1.2. *Session 2.* On day 2, participants performed the semantic relatedness judgment task and the word-picture relatedness judgment task respectively. Both were presented on LimeSurvey 2.06. Participants first received written instructions about the semantic relatedness judgment task and two examples representing low semantically related pairs and high semantically related pairs on the Likert scale. To make sure that participants focused on semantic relationships between the pairs of words instead of focusing on whether words had been presented or not during the IAR task, four additional examples were provided orally by the experimenter. Each additional example illustrated a kind of semantic relationship (e.g., functional, categorical, associative). Two training trials were then proposed before proceeding with the 60 trials presented in random order. In each trial, pairs of words were presented one at a time. Each pair of words was displayed side by side on a white background and the 7-point Likert scale was positioned below them. Participants were asked to rate the degree of semantic relatedness for each pair of words before going on the next trial. At the end of the task, they were informed that they would have to do a second task, corresponding to the word-picture relatedness judgment task. This task followed the same structure as the semantic relatedness judgment task with the

<footnote n="3">³ Words proposed by only one participant among the 84 respondents to name one of the 40 tangram pictures from set 1.</footnote>
<caption>**Table 3**</caption>

Psycholinguistic properties of pairs of words of the semantic relatedness judgment task for experimental lists 1 and 2 separately, Experiment 2.

<table><thead><tr><th rowspan="2"></th><th rowspan="2"></th><th colspan="2">Lexical frequency</th><th colspan="2">Number of letters</th><th colspan="2">Number of phonemes</th><th colspan="2">Number of orthographic neighbors</th><th colspan="2">Number of phonological neighbors</th></tr><tr><th>Mean</th><th>SD</th><th>Mean</th><th>SD</th><th>Mean</th><th>SD</th><th>Mean</th><th>SD</th><th>Mean</th><th>SD</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td rowspan="2">List 1</td><td>Primes</td><td>45.40</td><td>88.84</td><td>5.90</td><td>1.59</td><td>4.40</td><td>1.43</td><td>3.10</td><td>3.18</td><td>6.60</td><td>7.17</td></tr><tr><td>Targets</td><td>28.08</td><td>44.07</td><td>6.20</td><td>1.20</td><td>4.60</td><td>1.27</td><td>3.20</td><td>4.40</td><td>9.75</td><td>10.40</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="2">List 2</td><td>Primes</td><td>50.40</td><td>129.17</td><td>6.10</td><td>1.52</td><td>4.40</td><td>1.31</td><td>4.60</td><td>6.42</td><td>8.45</td><td>9.13</td></tr><tr><td>Targets</td><td>30.78</td><td>45.65</td><td>6.20</td><td>1.77</td><td>4.60</td><td>1.53</td><td>3.60</td><td>5.43</td><td>9.15</td><td>8.62</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="2">Highly semantically related</td><td>Word 1</td><td>44.01</td><td>76.37</td><td>6.10</td><td>1.52</td><td>4.25</td><td>1.37</td><td>3.05</td><td>3.75</td><td>10.45</td><td>8.79</td></tr><tr><td>Word 2</td><td>23.53</td><td>34.94</td><td>6.30</td><td>2.66</td><td>4.85</td><td>2.23</td><td>2.95</td><td>4.24</td><td>8.75</td><td>9.95</td></tr></tbody></table>

Note. All properties were extracted from New et al. (2004); lexical frequency was based on movie subtitle corpora.

<caption>**Table 4**</caption>

Psycholinguistic properties of words presented in the word-picture relatedness judgment task corresponding to the primes and targets for experimental lists 1 and 2 separately, Experiment 2.

<table><thead><tr><th rowspan="2"></th><th rowspan="2"></th><th colspan="2">Lexical frequency</th><th colspan="2">Number of letters</th><th colspan="2">Number of phonemes</th><th colspan="2">Number of orthographic neighbors</th><th colspan="2">Number of phonological neighbors</th></tr><tr><th>Mean</th><th>SD</th><th>Mean</th><th>SD</th><th>Mean</th><th>SD</th><th>Mean</th><th>SD</th><th>Mean</th><th>SD</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td rowspan="4">List 1</td><td>Word 1. related</td><td>45.40</td><td>88.84</td><td>5.90</td><td>1.59</td><td>4.40</td><td>1.43</td><td>3.10</td><td>3.18</td><td>6.60</td><td>7.17</td></tr><tr><td>Word 2. related</td><td>28.08</td><td>44.07</td><td>6.20</td><td>1.20</td><td>4.60</td><td>1.27</td><td>3.20</td><td>4.40</td><td>9.75</td><td>10.40</td></tr><tr><td>Word 1. unrelated</td><td>44.72</td><td>53.00</td><td>5.90</td><td>2.07</td><td>4.45</td><td>1.76</td><td>2.95</td><td>3.68</td><td>9.55</td><td>8.67</td></tr><tr><td>Word 2. unrelated</td><td>34.02</td><td>51.51</td><td>6.10</td><td>2.02</td><td>4.35</td><td>1.39</td><td>4.15</td><td>5.91</td><td>9.85</td><td>10.39</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="4">List 2</td><td>Word 1. related</td><td>50.40</td><td>129.17</td><td>6.10</td><td>1.52</td><td>4.40</td><td>1.31</td><td>4.60</td><td>6.42</td><td>8.45</td><td>9.13</td></tr><tr><td>Word 2. related</td><td>30.78</td><td>45.65</td><td>6.20</td><td>1.77</td><td>4.60</td><td>1.53</td><td>3.60</td><td>5.43</td><td>9.15</td><td>8.62</td></tr><tr><td>Word 1. unrelated</td><td>44.72</td><td>53.00</td><td>5.90</td><td>2.07</td><td>5.45</td><td>1.76</td><td>2.95</td><td>3.68</td><td>9.55</td><td>8.67</td></tr><tr><td>Word 2. unrelated</td><td>32.66</td><td>44.48</td><td>6.40</td><td>1.73</td><td>4.70</td><td>1.78</td><td>2.85</td><td>3.87</td><td>6.80</td><td>6.45</td></tr></tbody></table>

Note. All properties were extracted from New et al. (2004); lexical frequency was based on movie subtitle corpora.

presentation of written instructions, two examples, and two training trials after which participants performed 80 trials. In each trial, the picture and the word were presented one above the other on a white background. The 7-point Likert scale was placed above the word-picture pair and participants were asked to rate the degree of relatedness between the picture and the word. The order of completion of both tasks was not counterbalanced. The reason was because the main question concerned the new semantic relationship between the pairs of words by using the semantic relatedness judgment task, and the second task was only a control one. We thus preferred to keep the semantic relatedness judgment task first to prevent any risk that the word-picture relatedness judgment task might influence the semantic relatedness judgment results between pairs of words. The completion of both tasks took approximately 15 min and was followed by the completion of the IRI and PSIQ-F questionnaires (Braun et al., 2015; Ceschi & Pictet, 2018). None of the participants spontaneously reported being aware of the presence of a confederate. As in Experiment 1, trials where participants expressed a disagreement and trials where confederates did not manage to produce the 4 repetitions were not excluded from the statistical analyses.

### 5.4.2. Control group

Participants in the control group completed the semantic relatedness judgment task between the pairs of words, the word-picture relatedness judgment task and the two questionnaires (IRI and PSIQ-F) via an online survey and in the same order as the experimental group. The survey was supported by LimeSurvey 2.06 and followed the same structure as that used for the experimental group.

## 5.5. Data analysis

### 5.5.1. Data pre-processing and statistical analyses

Data from the semantic relatedness judgment task were analyzed in two steps. We first checked that the participants from both the experimental and the control groups used the whole scale to rate the three types of word pairs. Both groups rated the highly semantically related pairs of words as accurately highly semantically related (experimental group, $M = 5.99$, $SD = 1.33$, control group, $M = 5.82$, $SD = 1.43$). After

removing the data from the words that were not presented in the IAR task (as these were not of interest in the study), we ran a linear mixed-effects model using the lme4 package in R (Baayen et al., 2008). Random effects included by-participant random intercepts, by-participant random slopes corresponding to relatedness, by-item random intercepts and by-item random slopes corresponding to the relatedness factor and group. By-item intercepts were represented by the target words of each pair. The dependent variable was the centred participants' scores on the scale of the semantic relatedness judgment task between pairs of words. There were two independent variables with the relatedness factor and the group. Therefore, the fixed effects were the relatedness of the pairs of words during the dialogue phase, either related or unrelated, the group, experimental vs. control, and the interaction between these two factors. In line with our specific hypotheses on each group, Bonferroni-corrected pairwise comparisons were performed. Two additional models were created to investigate the modulation effects of empathy and mental imagery on the ratings from the semantic relatedness judgment task. These models both included by-participant and by-item random intercepts. The first model included both the relatedness of the pairs of words, the group and the centred data for each dimension of the IRI questionnaire as fixed effects (Personal Distress, Perspective Taking, Empathic Concern and Fantasy). The second model also included the relatedness of the pair of words as fixed effect, as well as centred data for each dimension of the PSIQ-F as fixed effects (Vision, Sound, Smell, Taste, Touch, Body and Emotion).

Data from the word-picture relatedness judgment task were analyzed to ensure that words referring to the same picture had been learned correctly with their associated pictures. We used a linear mixed-effects model, performed with the lme4 package in R (Baayen et al., 2008). Random effects included intercepts of participants and items, represented by the words of each word-picture pair (Barr et al., 2013), by-participant random slopes corresponding to word-picture relatedness and by-item random slopes corresponding to group. The dependent variable was the centred participants' scores on the scale of the word-picture relatedness judgment task. The fixed effects were the two factors, the word-picture relatedness, either word referring or not to a picture during the dialogue, and group, experimental vs. control. No
further analyses were performed as the word-picture relatedness judgment task was only a control task.

Importantly, although the participants performed the word-picture relatedness judgment task after the semantic relatedness judgment task, we report the results from the word-picture relatedness judgment task first in the following section. Indeed, this task allowed us to ensure that participants from the experimental group correctly learned the association between each word and their corresponding picture during the IAR task. We then report the results from the semantic relatedness judgment task, as these enable us to test our hypothesis directly.

## 6. Results of Experiment 2

The mixed model used to analyze the word-picture relatedness scores revealed a significant interaction between the word-picture relatedness and the group of participants, $b = -0.76$, $SE = 0.17$, $\chi^2(1) = 19.86$, $p < .001$; see Table 5).

The *b* value suggests that this significant interaction was due to the fact that the word-picture relatedness scores (Table 6) were higher for word-picture pairs presented during dialogue (i.e., stimuli presented as word pairs referring to the same picture) in the experimental group but not in the control group. This difference between the two groups of participants was stronger for word-picture pairs presented during dialogue (i.e., stimuli presented as word pairs referring to the same picture) in comparison with that for word-picture pairs not presented during dialogue.

Crucially to the objective of the present study, the analysis of the semantic relatedness judgment scores between pairs of words showed a significant interaction between the relatedness factor (related vs. unrelated condition) and the group of participants (either included in the experimental group or in the control group), $b = 0.50$, $SE = 0.14$, $\chi^2(1) = 12.63$, $p < .001$ (see Table 7). This interaction was illustrated in Fig. 6. The pairwise comparisons revealed that as expected, the scores of semantic relatedness for pairs of words referring to the same tangram picture during dialogue were higher than for those referring to two different tangram pictures during dialogue in the experimental group ($b = -0.38$, $SE = 0.11$, $t(71.9) = -3.52$, $p = .005$). In contrast, there was no significant effect of the relatedness factor in the control group ($b = 0.10$, $SE = 0.11$, $t(71.9) = 0.97$, $p = 1.00$). It should be noted that no

<table><caption>**Table 5**
Fixed and Random effects of the word-picture relatedness task, Experiment 2.</caption><thead><tr><th>Fixed effects</th><th>χ<sup>2</sup></th><th>DF</th><th>B</th><th>SE</th><th>p</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>WP_relatedness</td><td>178.72</td><td>1</td><td>-2.68</td><td>0.20</td><td>&lt;0.01*</td></tr><tr><td>Group_participant</td><td>7.33</td><td>1</td><td>0.36</td><td>0.13</td><td>0.01*</td></tr><tr><td>WP_relatedness * Group_participant</td><td>19.86</td><td>1</td><td>-0.76</td><td>0.17</td><td>&lt;0.01*</td></tr></tbody></table>

<table><caption>**Table 6**
Mean and standard deviation for the scores of word-picture relatedness, Experiment 2.</caption><thead><tr><th>Random effects</th><th>Variance</th><th>SD</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Item</td><td>0.17</td><td>0.41</td></tr><tr><td>Participant</td><td>0.39</td><td>0.63</td></tr><tr><td>Residual</td><td>1.98</td><td>1.41</td></tr></tbody></table>

<table><thead><tr><th rowspan="2"></th><th colspan="2">Experimental group</th><th colspan="2">Control group</th></tr><tr><th>Mean</th><th>SD</th><th>Mean</th><th>SD</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Related in the dialogue</td><td>6.13</td><td>1.23</td><td>5.28</td><td>1.93</td></tr><tr><td>Unrelated and not presented in the dialogue</td><td>2.70</td><td>2.02</td><td>2.60</td><td>2.04</td></tr></tbody></table>

*Note.* Scores of word-picture relatedness for each group of participants (Experimental or Control) and each type of word-picture pair (“Related in the dialogue” or “Unrelated and not presented in the dialogue”).

<table><caption>**Table 7**
Fixed and random effects of the semantic relatedness task, Experiment 2.</caption><thead><tr><th>Fixed effects</th><th>χ<sup>2</sup></th><th>DF</th><th>b</th><th>SE</th><th>P</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Relatedness_factor</td><td>1.20</td><td>1</td><td>-0.11</td><td>0.10</td><td>0.27</td></tr><tr><td>Group_participant</td><td>0.04</td><td>1</td><td>-0.04</td><td>0.19</td><td>0.84</td></tr><tr><td>Relatedness_factor * Group_participant</td><td>12.63</td><td>1</td><td>0.50</td><td>0.14</td><td>&lt;0.01*</td></tr></tbody></table>

<table><thead><tr><th>Random effects</th><th>Factor</th><th>Variance</th><th>SD</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Participant</td><td>Relatedness_factor</td><td>0.26</td><td>0.51</td></tr><tr><td>Item</td><td>Relatedness_factor</td><td>0.02</td><td>0.16</td></tr><tr><td>Participant</td><td>Group_participant</td><td>0.06</td><td>0.24</td></tr><tr><td>Residual</td><td></td><td>1.38</td><td>1.18</td></tr></tbody></table>

<figure><img src="image_9.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 6.** Semantic relatedness scores as a function of the groups of participants and the relatedness factor in Experiment 2. *Note.* Vertical bars correspond to standard deviation. The asterisks denote significance ($p < .01$).</figcaption></figure>

participant from the experimental group reported in the debriefing having rated the pairs of words based on what they remembered of the IAR task. Finally, the two additional models created to investigate the modulation effects of personal abilities showed no significant interaction between relatedness, groups of participants and the one of the two questionnaires (IRI for empathy or PSIQ-F for mental imagery; see Appendix C).

As in Experiment 1, an additional analysis including participation time was conducted. This analysis of the semantic relatedness judgment scores is reported in Appendix C. As in Experiment 1, no significant effect of participation time was found; these results are therefore not discussed further in the remainder of this paper.

## 7. Discussion of Experiment 2

The aim of Experiment 2 was to explore whether changes in pre-existing lexico-semantic representations occurred after one night of consolidation when attentional processes were explicitly recruited to amplify the degree of activation into the lexico-semantic network due to the instructions of the semantic relatedness judgment task. To do so, participants performed the same IAR task as in Experiment 1 and
returned one day later to perform the semantic relatedness judgment task between pairs of words. The latter were presented through the visual modality to prevent any potential episodic priming effects. Interestingly, the additional word-picture relatedness judgment task revealed that participants had correctly learned the word-picture associations between each of the two words used to name the same picture during the IAR task and their associated pictures. This result confirms that they paid attention to the two words referring to the same picture during dialogue, and they encoded the new mapping between each word and the picture used in a dialogue. Crucially to the objective of the present study, participants who took part in the dialogue phase rated the pairs of words associated with the same picture during the dialogue phase as being more semantically related than the pairs of words associated with two different pictures. In contrast, participants who did not take part in the dialogue phase rated both types of pairs in the same way. One may raise the question of the impact of the distinct experimental settings between the experimental and control groups – in lab vs. online – on the participants' semantic judgments. However, such impact can be excluded in this experiment. Indeed, mean semantic relatedness scores for semantically related pairs tended to be very similar in both groups (experimental group, M = 5.99, SD = 1.33, control group, M = 5.82, SD = 1.43). Moreover, we can rule out that the main finding of the second experiment was due to a simple memory effect due to having seen the two words together the day before. To prevent such a memory effect, the experimenter provided an additional oral instruction to focus participants' attention on shared semantic properties between the pairs of words. Additionally, the rating of the experimental group on the highly semantically related pairs of words as highly semantically related as expected and the absence of participants' report that they would have rated the pairs of words based on the dialogue task during the debrief were inconsistent with an explanation in terms of memory. Altogether, the main results of experiment 2 suggest that pre-existing lexico-semantic representations are changed after one night of consolidation when semantic control processes help to shape their activation in the lexico-semantic network by focusing top-down attention on semantic relationships.

# 8. General discussion

The aim of the present study was to examine to what extent new semantic relationships created in dialogue changed pre-existing lexico-semantic representations in long term after a dialogue. In two experiments, we asked participants to take part in a new experimental dialogic setting, the interactive agreement referential task (IAR), during which a participant and a confederate interacting via an audio-conference device came to an agreement on how to refer to tangram pictures presented on their screens. We took advantage of new word-visual representation mappings during dialogue to create new semantic relationships between pairs of words. The role of the confederate was to refer to each picture using either one word or two words, and to justify the relationship between each word and its corresponding picture. By doing so, two types of pairs of words were created: half of them were related to the same visual representation during dialogue, and the other half were used to describe different pictures during dialogue. We hypothesized that the creation of a new semantic relationship between pairs of words used as picture's referential labels during the dialogue could change pre-existing lexico-semantic representations associated with these words one day after dialogue. By using two different methods of assessment across our two experiments, either implicit (Experiment 1) or explicit (Experiment 2), we also explored the nature of the changes in the lexico-semantic network. In Experiment 1, we investigated whether these changes were associated with the establishment of strong connections into the lexico-semantic network by using a lexical decision task coupled with a semantic priming paradigm one day after dialogue. Experiment 2 was

created to assess whether changes in pre-existing lexico-semantic representations one day after the dialogue were related to new weak yet reachable connections by amplifying the degree of activation into the network thanks to attentional processes.

The results of the two experiments partially show that dialogue can affect people's pre-existing lexico-semantic representations in long term. Indeed, the results of Experiment 2 showed a clear pattern of relatedness given that newly related words were rated more semantically related than unrelated words. Crucially, the relatedness effect evidenced in Experiment 2 was present only in the experimental group who took part in the dialogue phase. Such findings support the idea that new semantic relationships created during dialogue changed pre-existing lexico-semantic representations after a night of sleep. The current study is the first to show that dialogue can impact the organization of the lexico-semantic network one day after the interaction. The findings of Experiment 1 with a lexical decision task coupled with a semantic priming paradigm contrasted with this evidence, as they showed no clear impact of dialogue on pre-existing lexico-semantic representations. Taken together, our findings shed light on the importance of the attention focused on the degree of semantic relatedness to show evidence of changes into the lexico-semantic network. The implications of these results are discussed in the following section.

## 8.1. *The impact of dialogue on long-term lexico-semantic representations*

Consistent with the previous studies showing changes in lexico-semantic representations in non-interactive language comprehension studies (Betts et al., 2018; Eligio & Kaschak, 2020; Fang & Perfetti, 2019; Hulme et al., 2019; Rodd et al., 2012, 2013, 2016), the current study highlights that dialogue can produce similar changes thanks to new word-meaning mappings. As well, the learning of new meanings on preexisting lexico-semantic representations has been most often evidenced with the use of an explicit task (e.g., Hulme et al., 2019; Rodd et al., 2012). The need for attentional processes, triggered by an explicit task to find evidence of changes in lexico-semantic representations, suggests the formation of new weak connections into the lexico-semantic network. Top-down attention orienting semantic control processes has been described as playing a role on the activation of networks of interconnected nodes by shaping their level of activation in order to prioritize context- or task-appropriate mental processes (Dehaene et al., 2006; Narhi-Martinez et al., 2023; Reilly et al., 2025). In line with these views describing the impact of top-down attention, de Wit and Kinoshita (2014, 2015) demonstrated that depending on the task used, the same prime-target pairs could lead to significant priming effect or not when the primes were masked or unmasked. They explained their results in terms of variations in activation through the semantic network, depending on whether participants have to explicitly check for semantic properties of the prime such as in a semantic categorization task.

The presence of changes in lexico-semantic representations one day after dialogue is also in line with the results of Rodd et al. (2016) and those of Gaskell et al. (2019) who explained their results by referring to a connectionist network model of ambiguous word representation and processing. They proposed an interpretation related to changes in lexico-semantic representations in terms of weight of the connections between words and meanings. According to this view, each encounter of a word-meaning mapping creates an activation in the lexico-semantic network that changes the weight of the connections after a night of consolidation. By this account, the encounter of the new relationship between the pairs of words during the dialogue is thought to produce new connections between both words into the lexico-semantic network. After a night of consolidation, the new connections between the pairs of words take on a certain weight, although full consolidation may require several additional sleep periods (Gaskell, 2024). This partial consolidation, together with the fact that participants encountered the new relationship only a
few times, likely explains why this weight was too weak to produce sufficient activation to be detectable with a semantic priming paradigm.<fnref n="4" /> In a real-life setting, words and meanings are encountered multiple times, and they may be encountered in different conversations taking place on different days, giving raise to changes in the weights between connections into the lexico-semantic network.

Our findings also raise the question of whether dialogue differs from other linguistic contexts in its impact on lexico-semantic representations. Indeed, creating new semantic relationships with tangram pictures has not been tested in language comprehension tasks. Among future studies on the changes of lexico-semantic representations in dialogue and isolated sentence comprehension, it could be interesting to clarify the impact of repetitions and spacing from new meaning information. Betts et al. (2018) pointed out that for a repetition to be useful, the information had to be spaced over time instead of massed. For instance, they showed a boost of changes in lexico-semantic representations after 3 repetitions when their presentation of sentences was spaced. In line with this study, we prompted participants to speak after each repetition so that the following repetition would occur at an interval dictated by turn-taking. The length of turn-taking between partners could however not be controlled in our work. The impact of such spacing should thus be explored in further studies in order to confirm its role in changes of pre-existing lexico-semantic representations in dialogue and isolated sentence comprehension.

## 8.2. Dialogue and memory

Studying the interface between dialogue and memory is not new (Brennan & Hanna, 2009; Horton & Gerrig, 2005a, 2005b; Horton & Gerrig, 2016; Knutsen & Le Bigot, 2014; McKinley et al., 2017; Nault et al., 2023). However, our findings constitute an original contribution to dialogue research. In particular, they help shed light on what people actually do when they build shared knowledge and conceptual pacts as they interact. According to the collaborative approach to dialogue (Brennan & Clark, 1996; Clark, 1996; Clark & Schaefer, 1987; Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986), when two people interact, the information they mention is added to their common ground, which includes the knowledge they share and are aware of sharing (Clark & Marshall, 1981). Dialogue partners may then resort to their common ground to adjust the content of their utterances to each other's dialogic needs, thus contributing directly to mutual understanding. Our findings suggest that the impact of dialogue on interlocutors is not limited to the establishment of shared knowledge and that dialogue also causes direct modifications in people's pre-existing linguistic representations stored in semantic memory. In the current study, such changes were only examined in one dialogue partner (that is, the participant, as the other dialogue partner was a confederate). However, in experimental dialogue settings involving two naïve participants, or in everyday life conversation, such changes are likely to affect both partners, which could imply that dialogue causes both partners' representations to become increasingly similar over the time course of the interaction, in line with the interactive alignment model (Pickering & Garrod, 2004, 2021). One intriguing question is whether such changes in partners' representations depend on their role (speaker vs. listener) during the dialogue. A growing body of research suggests that dialogue partners are subject to a self-generation effect, whereby self-generated information is remembered better than partner-generated information during and after the end of a dialogue (e.g., Knutsen et al., 2016, 2017; Knutsen & Le Bigot, 2014, 2020; McKinley et al., 2017). In a similar way, changes in lexico-

semantic representations could be stronger in the partner who created new meaning than when the partner only received this information from the other person. This suggestion could not be tested in the current study, and further studies are needed to explore this question. Thus, even if the presence of a confederate aware of the working hypothesis was necessary to ensure enough experimental control in the current study, future studies should focus on more ecological settings and explore the dialogical settings including naïve participants. In addition, such ecological settings may involve goal-oriented dialogue (as in the current study) or not, allowing us to investigate the generalizability of our findings to various kinds of communication settings. The present study thus constituted only a first step toward a better understanding of dialogue by proposing a task which prompted natural dialogue while offering enough experimental control.

Moreover, the current study provides new perspectives on the links between dialogue and semantic memory and open up new questions about episodic traces and abstract representations in contact with dialogue. Interestingly, a new mapping between a word and an object used in a dialogue is deemed part of the partners' common ground. For instance, information mentioned during a dialogue between partners A and B is deemed part of A and B's common ground; both A and B can subsequently resort to this information to produce partner-adjusted utterances. Common ground has been described as partner-specific (Brennan & Clark, 1996; Metzing & Brennan, 2003). The framework that we propose is that although common ground is partner-specific, the changes incurred in each participant's lexico-semantic representations are not necessarily partner-specific, and they might affect subsequent interactions regardless of who these take place with. To promote that the changes incurred in each participant's lexico-semantic representations are not necessarily partner-specific, the Interactive Agreement Referential task was developed to favor the abstraction of the new semantic relationship between pairs of words referring to the same visual representation by varying the order of presentation of each word of the pair. In addition, contrary to studies in episodic priming (Dagenbach et al., 1990; Durgunoglu & Neely, 1987), the modality through which the words were conveyed during dialogue (i.e., the auditory modality) differed from the one in which the access to lexico-semantic representations was assessed after dialogue (i.e., written modality). Further studies should investigate which interactive situations lead to changes in linguistic representations, whether these changes are specific to the partner or not, and to what extent they occur during and after dialogue. As highlighted by the dual-pathway account, which incorporates both flexibility and stability between the two memory systems (Gaskell, 2024), studying interactions between episodic traces and abstract representations would be very relevant to understand the complementary roles of the two memory systems and their links with lexico-semantic networks.

## 9. Conclusion

The two experiments reported here demonstrate how dialogue can affect pre-existing representations by changing the organization of the lexico-semantic network. Such changes are not visible with a lexical decision task combining with a semantic priming paradigm while the use of a semantic relatedness judgment task evidenced changes of lexico-semantic representations one day after a dialogue. This finding suggests that changes in lexico-semantic representations take the form of new connections into the lexico-semantic network. Nonetheless, attention is required to capture activation of new connections into semantic memory. More than using new knowledge to achieve a good coordination between partners or being able to remember certain events produced by partners, dialogue can impact long-term semantic representations and multiple interactions could reinforce these changes.

<footnote n="4">⁴ Note that the same paradigm has also been applied with a lexical decision task and a semantic priming paradigm performed immediately after the IAR task to determine whether changes in the lexico-semantic representations operated during dialogue could be observed immediately after dialogue. However, no traces of new relationships were observed.</footnote>
## CRediT authorship contribution statement

**Alicia Fasquel:** Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Software, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization.
**Wassila El Mardi:** Writing – review & editing, Software, Methodology, Investigation, Data curation.
**Isabelle Bonnotte:** Writing – review & editing, Methodology, Conceptualization.
**Dominique Knutsen:** Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Methodology, Investigation, Conceptualization.
**Angèle Brunellière:** Writing – review & editing, Validation, Supervision, Project administration, Methodology, Investigation, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Conceptualization.

## Declaration of competing interest

All authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

## Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant awarded by the French National Research Agency (ANR-19-CE28-0006) to Angèle Brunellière. We are very grateful to Laura Boulongne, Emilie Clad, Rémi Lefèvre, Laurent Ott and Carla Ridel for their help in analyzing the productions of confederates in the IAR task and setting up the three experiments. The manuscript was proofread by a native-speaking English copyeditor. We are also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their help during the peer review process.

## Supplementary data

Supplementary data to this article including Appendix A, B and C can be found on line at the following url, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actps. y.2025.105513.

## Data availability

The data and R scripts of the experiments can be found at the following url, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10419752, which includes an example of confederate's script, and the pictures used in the experiments. The new picture database described in this paper is also online available at the same url.

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