Persistent Priors, Preserved Targets: A Stroop-Style Paradigm for Lexical Override

Local definitions can assign a familiar word a temporary meaning while its usual associations remain useful elsewhere. We measure interference from those associations with a matched Stroop-style paradigm. A conflict prompt defines doctor as forest and compares forest with the familiar associate hospital. A neutral control replaces doctor with a semantically weak word in both the definition and query while keeping forest and hospital fixed. All 11 model-level means are positive. Aggregate means are also positive for all four conflict families and prompt formats. When no redefinition is present, a stronger preference for the familiar distractor predicts more interference in arbitrary-semant...

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