Conceptualizing semantic transparency: A systematic analysis of semantic transparency measures in English compound words

Abstract

Semantic transparency refers to the extent to which the meaning of a multimorphemic word can be determined from the meaning of its constituents. In terms of compounds, semantic transparency has been operationally defined in multiple ways, and research has sometimes produced conflicting results concerning its effect on processing. This study explored a potential source of these experimental conflicts by examining the methodology and measures used to operationalize semantic transparency. First, we used factor analysis to investigate whether common measures of semantic transparency truly inform the same underlying construct and found that there were at least four factors represented by eleven common semantic transparency variables. After extracting predicted values from these factors, we found that different aspects of semantic transparency are not equally predictive of behavioural data from lexical decision and naming tasks. Moreover, the various aspects represented by the different measures appear to interact and influence each other when predicting this behavioural data. We conclude that different measures of semantic transparency reflect different constructs, and that this should be considered when investigating the effect of semantic transparency.