Abstract
The purpose of the present experiment is to obtain information about the codes that underlie mental representations. More precisely it tries to corrobarate that the verification times of the truth or falseness of written sentences are shortened by their image values. We also want to verify if other kinds of varaibles, such as the conceptual relationships, biological versus non-biological content, and generality level, are also implicated. The semantic-conceptual relationships were categorized as classificatory, perceptual, and functional. Twenty two adult subjects participated in the experiment. The sentences were visually presented by means of a series of slides -292- whose content came from a previpus experiment. An LA-63013 chronoscope was used to measure the reaction times. The results showed that the sentences in which a classificatory relationship - "is a"- was implicated took less times to be verifies than the perceptual ones and these less than the functional ones (Student's't' was used). On the other hand, the Sperman correlations used to verify if reaction times were correlated with image values were not significant, except in the higt image value group -9 sentences only-. Finally, the reaction times for biological content sentences were shortes than for non-biological, and for basic-level sentences shortes than for superordinate (variance analysis). The interaction between category type and generality level was not significant.
