Stepping out of the Chinese Room: Word meaning with and without consciousness
Authors: Roberto Bottini, Daniel Casasanto, Andrea Nadalini, Davide Crepaldi (Università di Trento, University of Chicago, SISSA, Milan Center for Neuroscience, 2016)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
What is the role of consciousness in language processing? Unconscious priming experiments show that words can prime other words with related meanings (cat – dog), and these priming effects are assumed to reflect the activation of conceptual knowledge in semantic memory. Alternatively, however, unconscious priming effects could reflect predictive relationships between the words’ forms, since words that are semantically related are also statistically related in language use. Therefore, unconscious “semantic” priming effects could be due to relationships between words’ forms mimicking conceptual relationships, as in Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment. To distinguish wordform-based and semantics-based accounts of priming we conducted an experiment in which temporal words (e.g., earlier, later) were preceded by spatial words that were processed either consciously or unconsciously. Time is typically conceptualized as a spatial continuum extending along either the sagittal (front-back) or the lateral (left-right) axis, but only the sagittal space-time mapping is encoded in language (e.g. the future is ahead, not to the right). Results showed that temporal words were primed both by sagittal words (back, front) and lateral words (left, right) when primes were perceived consciously, as predicted by both wordform-based and semantics-based accounts. Yet, only sagittal words produced an unconscious priming effect, as predicted by the wordform-based account. Unconscious word processing appears to be limited to relationships between words’ forms, and consciousness may be needed to activate words’ meanings.

Introduction
What role does consciousness play in word meaning’s construction? As previous literature has pointed out, lexical items seem to be processed up to the semantic level even when processed out of awareness AUTHOR. Most evidence for this claim comes from masked priming: When two words are sequentially presented, the recognition of the latter is made easier if the two are semantically related (cat-dog), even when the visibility of the former (the prime) is prevented by displaying it very briefly, embedded between visual masks AUTHOR. For instance, participants are likely to classify more quickly the word dog as referring to a living entity when it is preceded by the semantically related word cat, rather than by a semantically unrelated word like apple. As similar effects are attested when the prime word is clearly visible, it has been suggested that lexical items can be processed up to the semantic level irrespective of their visibility. We will refer to this perspective as the semantic-based account of masked priming, as it assumes that words are processed beyond their surface structure and activate conceptual knowledge about their referents. Such knowledge is thought to be stored within the semantic memory, where concepts and concepts’ features are represented in an interconnected network AUTHOR. In such a view, cat would prime dog as both words refer to mammals that have four legs, have a tail, can be pet, and so on; and therefore they are more closely related to each other than to apple. However, there is an aspect of semantic similarity that has been largely overlooked in the priming-related literature, that words with similar meaning tend to have a similar contextual distribution. As corpus-based studies have pointed out, words referring to entities with similar perceptual and conceptual attributes tend be used together (e.g., dog and cat are more likely to co-occur in the same sentence than dog and apple), and to be used in similar contexts (e.g., both cat and dog tend to appear when speaking about pets, whether or not they co-occur within a given utterance; AUTHOR). Based on this fact, unconscious priming may be alternatively explained through predictive relationships between words’ forms established in language use. According to the wordform-based account, cat would prime dog simply because the two words share a similar contextual distribution. No conceptual representation is involved, as the locus of the unconscious semantic priming would be the lexical system, not semantic memory (AUTHOR). This latter interpretation of unconscious word processing somehow resembles the Chinese Room thought experiment developed by the philosopher John Searle, where an English-speaking man is closed in a room receiving message written in Chinese characters AUTHOR. Due to a set of norms that determine the relationships between those characters (if you see X followed by Y, than reply Z), he is able to provide answers that would look perfectly appropriate to a native speaker. From the outside, it would appear that the man has a good understanding of the language, while instead he is acting on the basis of associations between word forms. Indeed, if he received a message saying that the room is about to explode, he would reply appropriately; but would not leave the room. For the semantic-based and wordform-based accounts of masked priming to be distinguished, it is necessary to find concepts that are related in the semantic system, but not in the lexical system. This is the case for the metaphorical relationship linking time to space. The two domains are strictly intertwined in the human mind, in such a way that space is often used to think about time AUTHOR. Time conceptualization involves both the sagittal and the lateral axis AUTHOR. For example, participants are faster in responding to past-related words by providing a leftward response, and to future-related words by providing a rightward response, relative to the opposite pattern. The same holds for the sagittal arrangement, with backward response associated with past-related words and forward response associated with future-related words. Moreover, neurological evidence shows that patients with hemispatial neglect have also impairments in temporal judgments (i.e. if they neglect the left side on space, they also show worst memory for past-related events; AUTHOR). Finally, people have been found to use hand gestures along both the lateral and the sagittal line when speaking about time AUTHOR. Critically, while the sagittal mapping is linguistically encoded in sentences such as “a bright future in front of you”, the lateral one is not. The existence of these two mental timelines, and the fact that only one of them is linguistically expressed, offers the ideal test-bed for contrasting the semantic-based and wordform-based accounts of unconscious word processing. The latter predicts that space–time priming would only emerge along the linguistically encoded sagittal axis when primes are kept outside of awareness; while the former would predict priming to emerge along both axes, both supra- and subliminally. ÙWe tested these predictions in a priming study with spatial words related to the lateral (left-right) and the sagittal (ahead-behind) axis as primes, and temporal words referring to either the past (yesterday) or the future (tomorrow) as target stimuli. In the first experiment, primes were clearly visible In the second experiment, prime visibility was prevented by means of a masking procedure.

Conclusion
In this study we looked at the nature of word processing with and without awareness. Using the relationships between space and time, we were able to disentangle the wordform-based from the semantic-based account of masked priming. When words were clearly visible, we found priming effect on both axes, which reflects the sagittal, linguistically encoded, timeline, as well as the lateral mapping, which relies only on conceptual knowledge. Conversely, subliminal priming was obtained only with the sagittal words, matching the predictions of the wordform-based account. Therefore, our data suggests that when people read words unconsciously, activation spreads only between predictively related wordforms. 
Unconscious priming between semantically related words may mimic semantic priming, much in the same way as the man inside Searle’s Chinese Room mimics knowledge of Chinese, on the basis of “meaningless” wordform-wordform relationships. Unconscious word processing appears to be limited to relationships between words’ forms, and consciousness may be needed to activate words’ meanings.