CiteULike: briordan's semantic-measures

Comparing Semantic Space Models Using Child-Directed Speech

Brian Riordan — 2008-07-06T00:30:17-00:00

(2007)

Comparing semantic space models using child-directed speech

Brian Riordan — 2008-06-20T20:57:59-00:00

(2007), pp. 599-604.

Semantic memory

Beth Ober — 2008-06-09T22:45:57-00:00

(2006), pp. 403-453.

Concepts and properties in word spaces

Marco Baroni — 2008-04-20T01:24:07-00:00

Italian Journal of Linguistics (to appear)

Language and simulation in conceptual processing

Lawrence Barsalou — 2008-04-03T15:06:56-00:00

(in press)

Semantic feature production norms for a large set of objects and events

David Vinson — 2008-02-26T02:22:00-00:00

Behavior Research Methods, Vol. 40, No. 1. (February 2008), pp. 183-190.

Predicting word-naming and lexical decision times from a semantic space model

Brendan Johns — 2008-02-27T15:25:39-00:00

The Word-Space Model: Using distributional analysis to represent syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations between words in high-dimensional vector spaces

Magnus Sahlgren — 2008-02-24T21:51:25-00:00

(2006)

A model of grounded language acquisition: Sensorimotor features improve lexical and grammatical learning

Steve Howell — 2005-06-21T09:18:01-00:00

Journal of Memory and Language, Vol. 53, No. 2. (August 2005), pp. 258-276.

It is generally accepted that children have sensorimotor mental representations for concepts even before they learn the words for those concepts. We argue that these prelinguistic and embodied concepts direct and ground word learning, such that early concepts provide scaffolding by which later word learning, and even grammar learning, is enabled and facilitated. We gathered numerical ratings of the sensorimotor features of many early words (352 nouns, 90 verbs) using adult human participants. We analyzed the ratings to demonstrate their ability to capture the embodied meaning of the underlying concepts. Then using a simulation experiment we demonstrated that with language corpora of sufficient complexity, neural network (SRN) models with sensorimotor features perform significantly better than models without features, as evidenced by their ability to perform word prediction, an aspect of grammar. We also discuss the possibility of indirect acquisition of grounded meaning through "propagation of grounding" for novel words in these networks.

Names, concepts, features and the living/nonliving things dissociation

Frederico Marques — 2008-02-06T19:45:20-00:00

Cognition, Vol. 85, No. 3. (October 2002), pp. 251-275.

The present paper evaluates different hypotheses for explaining the living/nonliving things dissociation phenomenon in terms of feature type, considering the role of this dimension in the organization of conceptual semantic representations and in the activation of name representations. For this purpose we used Sloman and associates' (Memory and Cognition 27(3) (1999) 526; Cognitive Science 22(2) (1998) 189) name centrality and conceptual centrality tasks and asked subjects to judge functional and perceptual/visual features of living and nonliving items. Conceptual centrality results are more in accordance with a "single feature-domain connection hypothesis" where visual features are more important than functional features for the representation of living things and no feature type advantage is found for nonliving things. Name centrality results show that functional features are more important than sensory/visual features overall, a result that is not predicted by any of the hypotheses considered. The fact that the two judgments diverge emphasizes their importance for evaluating the role of feature type in the living/nonliving dissociation. Implications for explaining this phenomenon are also discussed.

Support for hybrid models of the age of acquisition of English nouns

Jamie Reilly — 2008-01-30T03:53:57-00:00

pp. 1164-1170.

Age of acquisition (AoA) is a psycholinguistic construct that refers to the chronological age at which a given word is acquired. Contemporary theories of AoA have focused on lexical acquisition with respect to either the developing phonological or semantic systems. One way of testing the relative dominance of phonological or semantic contributions is through open-source psycholinguistic databases, whereby AoA may be correlated with other variables (e.g., morphology, semantics, phonology). We report two multiple regression analyses conducted on a corpus of English nouns with, respectively, subjective and objective AoA measures as the dependent variables and a combination of 10 predictors, including 2 semantic, 4 phonological, 2 morphological, and 2 lexical. This multivariate combination of predictors accounted for significant proportions of the variance of AoA in both analyses. We argue that this evidence supports hybrid models of language development that integrate multiple levels of processing—from sound to meaning.

Activating event knowledge

Hare — 2007-12-29T19:52:30-00:00

??? (submitted)

The general/specific breakdown of semantic memory and the nature of superordinate knowledge: Insights from superordinate and basic-level feature norms

Frederico Marques — 2007-12-27T12:44:56-00:00

Cognitive Neuropsychology, Vol. 24, No. 8. (2007), pp. 879-903.

The deterioration of semantic memory usually proceeds from more specific to more general superordinate categories, although rarer cases of superordinate knowledge impairment have also been reported. The nature of superordinate knowledge and the explanation of these two semantic impairments were evaluated from the analysis of superordinate and basic-level feature norms. The results show that, in comparison to basic-level concepts, superordinate concepts are not generally less informative and have similar feature distinctiveness and proportion of individual sensory features, but their features are less shared by their members. Results are in accord with explanations based on feature connection weights and/or concept confusability for the superordinate advantage cases. Results especially support an explanation for superordinate impairments in terms of higher semantic control requirements as related to features being less shared between concept members. Implications for patients with semantic impairments are also discussed.

Lexical co-occurrence and association strength

Donald Spence — 2007-12-16T16:48:29-00:00

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Vol. 19, No. 5. (1990), pp. 317-330.

The 1-million-word Brown corpus was searched for co-occurrences of semantically related pairs of concrete nouns appearing within an arbitrary window of 250 characters. Related pairs of nouns (OCEAN-WATER) co-occur significantly more often than matched, unrelated pairs (OCEAN-HAND), and this difference remained significant within blocks of text up to 1000 characters in length. Frequency of co-occurrence, corrected for chance, is significantly correlated with association strength. Lexical distance between co-occurring members of a given pair is inversely correlated with association strength. Significantly more co-occurrences were found, per unit text, in the fictional sections of the corpus.

Latent structure in measures of associative, semantic, and thematic knowledge

William Maki — 2007-12-16T15:10:30-00:00

Behavior Research Methods, Vol. 15, No. 3. (June 2008), pp. 598-603.

Semantic packing as a core mechanism of category cohesiveness, fast mapping, and basic level categories

Shohei Hidaka — 2007-12-11T02:13:29-00:00

(2006), pp. 1500-1505.

Associative judgments block semantic processing

Erin Buchanan — 2007-11-20T19:26:24-00:00

An efficient method for estimating semantic similarity based on feature overlap: Reliability and validity of semantic feature ratings

Maki — 2006-06-04T13:32:36-00:00

Behavior Research Methods, Vol. 38, No. 1. (February 2006), pp. 153-157.

Data mining at the intersection of psychology and linguistics

Harald Baayen — 2007-11-05T21:20:16-00:00

Beyond common features: The role of roles in determining similarity

Matt Jones — 2007-02-21T20:21:12-00:00

Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 55, No. 3. (November 2007), pp. 196-231.

Historically, accounts of object representation and perceived similarity have focused on intrinsic features. Although more recent accounts have explored how objects, scenes, and situations containing common relational structures come to be perceived as similar, less is known about how the perceived similarity of parts or objects embedded within these relational systems is affected. The current studies test the hypothesis that objects situated in common relational systems come to be perceived as more similar. Similarity increases most for objects playing the same role within a relation (e.g., predator), but also increases for objects playing different roles within the same relation (e.g., the predator or prey role in the hunts relation) regardless of whether the objects participate in the same instance of the relation. This pattern of results can be captured by extending existing models that extract meaning from text corpora so that they are sensitive to the verb-specific thematic roles that objects fill. Alternative explanations based on analogical and inferential processes are also considered, as well as the implications of the current findings to research in language processing, decision making, and category learning.

Concept empiricism: A methodological critique

Edouard Machery — 2006-07-24T10:20:38-00:00

Cognition, Vol. 104, No. 1. (July 2007), pp. 19-46.

Thanks to Barsalou's, Damasio's, Glenberg's, Prinz' and others' work, neo-empiricism is gaining a deserved recognition in the psychology and philosophy of concepts. I argue, however, that neo-empiricists have underestimated the difficulty of providing evidence against the amodal approach to concepts and higher cognition. I highlight three key problems: the difficulty of sorting out amodal predictions from neo-empiricist predictions, the difficulty of finding experimental tasks that are not best solved by imagery and the difficulty of generalizing findings concerning a given cognitive process in a given context to other cognitive processes or other contexts. Finally, solutions to these three problems are considered.

Word meaning and the control of eye fixation: semantic competitor effects and the visual world paradigm

Falk Huettig — 2005-04-28T13:55:32-00:00

Cognition, Vol. 96, No. 1. (May 2005), pp. B23-B32.

When participants are presented simultaneously with spoken language and a visual display depicting objects to which that language refers, participants spontaneously fixate the visual referents of the words being heard [Cooper, R. M. (1974). The control of eye fixation by the meaning of spoken language: A new methodology for the real-time investigation of speech perception, memory, and language processing. Cognitive Psychology, 6(1), 84-107; Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K. M., & Sedivy, J. C. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science, 268(5217), 1632-1634]. We demonstrate here that such spontaneous fixation can be driven by partial semantic overlap between a word and a visual object. Participants heard the word 'piano' when (a) a piano was depicted amongst unrelated distractors; (b) a trumpet was depicted amongst those same distractors; and (c), both the piano and trumpet were depicted. The probability of fixating the piano and the trumpet in the first two conditions rose as the word 'piano' unfolded. In the final condition, only fixations to the piano rose, although the trumpet was fixated more than the distractors. We conclude that eye movements are driven by the degree of match, along various dimensions that go beyond simple visual form, between a word and the mental representations of objects in the concurrent visual field.

Symmetries in human brain language pathways correlate with verbal recall

Marco Catani — 2007-10-24T17:13:20-00:00

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 104, No. 43. (23 October 2007), pp. 17163-17168.

Lateralization of language to the left hemisphere is considered a key aspect of human brain organization. We used diffusion tensor MRI to perform in vivo virtual dissection of language pathways to assess the relationship between brain asymmetry and cognitive performance in the normal population. Our findings suggest interhemispheric differences in direct connections between Broca's and Wernicke's territories, with extreme leftward lateralization in more than half of the subjects and bilateral symmetrical distribution in only 17.5% of the subjects. Importantly, individuals with more symmetric patterns of connections are better overall at remembering words using semantic association. Moreover, preliminary analysis suggests females are more likely to have a symmetrical pattern of connections. These findings suggest that the degree of lateralization of perisylvian pathways is heterogeneous in the normal population and, paradoxically, bilateral representation, not extreme lateralization, might ultimately be advantageous for specific cognitive functions. 10.1073/pnas.0702116104

On the nature and scope of featural representations of word meaning

K Mcrae — 2007-10-20T17:46:08-00:00

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Vol. 126, No. 2. (1997), pp. 99-130.

Behavioral experiments and a connectionist model were used to explore the use of featural representations in the computation of word meaning. The research focused on the role of correlations among features, and differences between speeded and untimed tasks with respect to the use of featural information. The results indicate that featural representations are used in the initial computation of word meaning (as in an attractor network), patterns of feature correlations differ between artifacts and living things, and the degree to which features are intercorrelated plays an important role in the organization of semantic memory. The studies also suggest that it may be possible to predict semantic priming effects from independently motivated featural theories of semantic relatedness. Implications for related behavioral phenomena such as the semantic impairments associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD) are discussed.

Analyzing the factors underlying the structure and computation of the meaning of chipmunk, cherry, chisel, cheese, and cello (and many other such concrete nouns)

George Cree — 2007-10-20T17:22:33-00:00

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Vol. 132, No. 2. (2003), 163-201.

Seven trends regarding the categories that tend to be impaired/preserved in category-specific semantic deficits were identified. The authors hypothesized that these trends arise despite the multiple sources of variation in patient testing because numerous factors that structure semantic memory probabilistically converge to make some categories of knowledge more susceptible to damage than others. Analysis of semantic feature norms and corpus data for 541 concepts revealed that differences in the distribution of knowledge types across categories are sufficient to explain 6 of the trends and are necessary to explain loss of knowledge about nonliving things. Feature informativeness, concept confusability, visual complexity, familiarity, and name frequency contributed to this patterning and provide insight into why knowledge about living things is most often impaired.

Semantic feature production norms for a large set of living and nonliving things

Ken Mcrae — 2006-05-18T14:14:36-00:00

Behavior Research Methods, Vol. 37, No. 4. (November 2005), pp. 547-559.

Similarities and variation in noun and verb acquisition: A crosslinguistic study of children learning German, Korean, and Turkish

Christina Kauschke — 2007-10-17T02:11:38-00:00

Language and Cognitive Processes, Vol. 22, No. 7. (2007), pp. 1-28.

The present study focuses on noun and verb processing during language acquisition, whereby the word production and the word comprehension of preschool children of different ages were investigated across three languages. Two hypotheses were put forward: first, given that languages differ with respect to the clarity of the noun-verb distinction and the saliency of nouns and verbs, crosslinguistic differences in acquisition were expected. Second, in the light of conceptual differences between the basic categories of nouns and verbs, category-specific effects were also expected. Of the children who participated in a naming study, 240 were German, 240 Korean, and 60 Turkish; 233 German and 99 additional German and Korean children were tested with a word-comprehension task. The target items were 36 nouns and 36 verbs, adapted for the three languages. The results are interpreted as evidence for both language-general tendencies and language-specific influences. Although the children were mostly better at processing nouns than verbs, the extent of this discrepancy differed across languages. The results also indicate more crosslinguistic variance in the case of nouns than in the case of verbs. The findings are discussed with respect to structural characteristics of the languages, developmental patterns in lexical acquisition, and characteristics of the task.

Reading Ability: Lexical Quality to Comprehension

Charles Perfetti — 2007-10-17T02:03:09-00:00

Scientific Studies of Reading, Vol. 11, No. 4. (2007), pp. 357-383.

The lexical quality hypothesis (LQH) claims that variation in the quality of word representations has consequences for reading skill, including comprehension. High lexical quality includes well-specified and partly redundant representations of form (orthography and phonology) and flexible representations of meaning, allowing for rapid and reliable meaning retrieval. Low-quality representations lead to specific word-related problems in comprehension. Six lines of research on adult readers demonstrate some of the implications of the LQH. First, large-scale correlational results show the general interdependence of comprehension and lexical skill while identifying disassociations that allow focus on comprehension-specific skill. Second, word-level semantic processing studies show comprehension skill differences in the time course of form-meaning confusions. Studies of rare vocabulary learning using event-related potentials (ERPs) show that, third, skilled comprehenders learn new words more effectively and show stronger ERP indicators for memory of the word learning event and, fourth, suggest skill differences in the stability of orthographic representations. Fifth, ERP markers show comprehension skill differences in meaning processing of ordinary words. Finally, in text reading, ERP results demonstrate momentary difficulties for low-skill comprehenders in integrating a word with the prior text. The studies provide evidence that word-level knowledge has consequences for word meaning processes in comprehension.

Contrasting effects of repetition across tasks: Implications for understanding the nature of refractory behavior and models of semantic memory

Emer Forde — 2007-10-08T02:28:01-00:00

pp. 198-211.

We describe a patient (J.M.) who showed “refractory” behavior in picture-word matching tasks—that is, his performance became poorer when items were repeated. This contrasts with the facilitatory effects of repetition usually observed in normal participants. We show for the first time that there can be facilitatory effects of repetition on some tasks, even though refractory behavior is shown on the same items in other tasks. In particular, in Experiments 1 and 2, we demonstrate that J.M. showed contrasting effects of repetition across different components of the language system: There were facilitatory effects of repetition priming on lexical decision but refractory behavior on picture-word matching. In Experiments 3 and 4, we demonstrate that J.M. showed contrasting effects of repetition within the same system (semantic memory). His performance became refractory when items were repeated in picture-word matching (Experiment 3), but it was facilitated when items were repeated in superordinate categorization (Experiment 4). These contrasting patterns of facilitation and interference from repetition priming have implications for understanding the nature of refractory behavior and for constraining theoretical accounts of semantic memory.

The English Lexicon Project

Balota — 2007-09-19T08:56:56-00:00

Behavior Research Methods, Vol. 39, No. 3. (August 2007), pp. 445-459.

A Sketch Algorithm for Estimating Two-Way and Multi-Way Associations

Ping Li — 2007-10-05T02:30:42-00:00

Comput. Linguist., Vol. 33, No. 3. (September 2007), pp. 305-354.

Semantic priming in deep-phonological dyslexia: Contrasting effects of association and similarity upon abstract and concrete word reading

Sebastian Crutch — 2007-10-04T22:50:12-00:00

Cognitive Neuropsychology, Vol. 24, No. 6. (2007), pp. 1-20.

We report a series of experiments investigating the reading abilities of a patient R.O.M. who exhibited the syndrome of deep-phonological dyslexia. In a series of semantic priming tasks, R.O.M. was requested to read word lists containing either abstract or concrete words, which were related by semantic similarity or semantic association, or which shared no clear semantic relationship. R.O.M. read semantically similar concrete words significantly more accurately than unrelated items, but showed no such advantage for semantically associated concrete words. By contrast, semantically associated abstract words were read significantly more accurately than unrelated items, but there was no evidence of priming for semantically similar abstract words. Thus, we describe an attempt to harness semantic priming to find converging evidence for a distinction between the representational frameworks underpinning abstract and concrete concepts. The findings are considered in the context of competing theories of the abstract/concrete distinction.

Semantic distance norms computed from an electronic dictionary (WordNet)

William Maki — 2007-10-01T15:33:56-00:00

pp. 421-431.

WordNet, an electronic dictionary (or lexical database), is a valuable resource for computational and cognitive scientists. Recent work on the computing of semantic distances among nodes (synsets) in WordNet has made it possible to build a large database of semantic distances for use in selecting word pairs for psychological research. The database now contains nearly 50,000 pairs of words that have values for semantic distance, associative strength, and similarity based on co-occurrence. Semantic distance was found to correlate weakly with these other measures but to correlate more strongly with another measure of semantic relatedness, featural similarity. Hierarchical clustering analysis suggested that the knowledge structure underlying semantic distance is similar in gross form to that underlying featural similarity. In experiments in which semantic similarity ratings were used, human participants were able to discriminate semantic distance. Thus, semantic distance as derived from WordNet appears distinct from other measures of word pair relatedness and is psychologically functional. This database may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive/.

Association and not semantic relationships elicit the N400 effect: Electrophysiological evidence from an explicit language comprehension task

Sinead Rhodes — 2007-09-19T18:51:37-00:00

Psychophysiology, Vol. 45, No. 1. (January 2008), pp. 50-59.

Abstract Language comprehension studies have identified the N400, an event-related potential (ERP) correlate of the processing of meaning, modulation of which is typically assumed to reflect the activation of semantic information. However, N400 studies of conscious language processing have not clearly distinguished between meaning derived from a semantic relationship and meaning extracted through association. We independently manipulated the presence of associative and semantic relationships while examining the N400 effect. Participants were asked to read and remember visually presented word pairs that shared an association (traffic-jam), an association+semantic relationship (lemon-orange), a semantic relationship alone (cereal-bread), or were unrelated (beard-tower). Modulation of the N400 (relative to unrelated word pairs) was observed for association and association+semantic word pairs but not for those that only shared a semantic relationship.