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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2008 Mar 11.
Published in final edited form as: Cogn Psychol. 2007 Jul 12;56(2):103–141. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2007.04.001

Figure 1.

Figure 1

The left panel shows the connections between concepts in the domain of fruit and their lexical counterparts. Internal details of the lexical entry are omitted. Note that the more typical fruit, apple, is more strongly connected to its superordinate (as indicated by the thicker line). The right panel shows the spreading of activation (amount of activation represented by the number of vertices in the star shape) when the concept of fruit is activated. Considerable activation flows to the apple concept, due to its typicality, and in turn to the word apple. Less activation flows to the lemon concept and therefore less to the word lemon. Thus, conceptual structure mediates lexical accessibility.