Measure Of Semantic Richness Research Articles

Mapping semantic space: property norms and semantic richness.

In semantic property listing tasks, participants list many features for some concepts and fewer for others. This variability in number of features (NoF) has been used in previous research as a measure of a concept's semantic richness, and such studies have shown that in lexical-semantic tasks responses tend to be facilitated for words with high NoF compared to those for words with low NoF, even when many other relevant factors are controlled (Pexman et al. in Psychon Bull Rev 9:542-549, 2002; Mem Cogn 31:842-855, 2003; Psychon Bull Rev 15:161-167, 2008; Goh et al. in Front Psychol, 2016. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00976 ). Furthermore, shared features (i.e., features that are shared by multiple words) appear to facilitate responses in lexical-semantic tasks to a greater degree than distinctive features (Devereux et al. in Cogn Sci 40:325-350, 2016; Grondin et al. in J Mem Lang 60:1-19, 2009). This previous work was limited, however, to relatively small sets of words, typically those extracted from the McRae norms (McRae et al. in Behav Res Methods 37(4):547-559, 2005). New property listing norms provide the opportunity to extract NoF values for many more items (Buchanan et al. in Behav Res Methods 51:1849-1863, 2019). The purpose of the present study was to test whether NoF effects generalize to this larger item set, and to explore how NoF is related to other measures of semantic richness, including subjective ratings of concreteness, imageability, body-object interaction, sensory experience, valence, arousal, and age of acquisition, as well as more objective measures like semantic diversity, number of associates, and lexical centrality. Using the new Buchanan norms, we found significant NoF effects in lexical decision (is it a word or a nonword?) and semantic decision (is it concrete or abstract?) tasks. We also found significant effects of words' number of shared (less distinctive) features in each task. Further, factor analyses of all semantic richness measures showed a distinct factor structure, suggesting that there are clusters of semantic richness dimensions that seem to correspond to more embodied semantic dimensions and more distributional semantic dimensions. Results are interpreted as evidence that semantic representation is multimodal and multidimensional, and provide new insights about the structure of semantic space.

Effects of Semantic Richness on Lexical Processing in Monolinguals and Bilinguals.

The effect of number of senses (NoS), a measure of semantic richness, was examined in monolingual English speakers (n = 17) and bilingual speakers of English and French (n = 18). Participants completed lexical decision tasks while EEG was recorded: monolinguals completed the task in English only, and bilinguals completed two lexical decision tasks, one in English and one in French. Effects of NoS were observed in both participant groups, with shorter response times and reduced N400 amplitudes to high relative to low NoS items. These effects were stronger in monolinguals than in bilinguals. Moreover, we found dissociations across languages in bilinguals, with stronger behavioral NoS effects in English and stronger event-related potential (ERP) NoS effects in French. This finding suggests that different aspects of linguistic performance may be stronger in each of a bilingual’s two languages.

Remote semantic memory is impoverished in hippocampal amnesia

The necessity of the hippocampus for acquiring new semantic concepts is a topic of considerable debate. However, it is generally accepted that any role the hippocampus plays in semantic memory is time limited and that previously acquired information becomes independent of the hippocampus over time. This view, along with intact naming and word-definition matching performance in amnesia, has led to the notion that remote semantic memory is intact in patients with hippocampal amnesia. Motivated by perspectives of word learning as a protracted process where additional features and senses of a word are added over time, and by recent discoveries about the time course of hippocampal contributions to on-line relational processing, reconsolidation, and the flexible integration of information, we revisit the notion that remote semantic memory is intact in amnesia. Using measures of semantic richness and vocabulary depth from psycholinguistics and first and second language-learning studies, we examined how much information is associated with previously acquired, highly familiar words in a group of patients with bilateral hippocampal damage and amnesia. Relative to healthy demographically matched comparison participants and a group of brain-damaged comparison participants, the patients with hippocampal amnesia performed significantly worse on both productive and receptive measures of vocabulary depth and semantic richness. These findings suggest that remote semantic memory is impoverished in patients with hippocampal amnesia and that the hippocampus may play a role in the maintenance and updating of semantic memory beyond its initial acquisition.

Semantic richness, concreteness, and object domain: An electrophysiological study.

Results from previous event-related potential (ERP) studies of semantic richness and concreteness effects have been mixed. Feature production norms have been used to derive one measure of semantic richness, the number of listed semantic features (NOF) for a given concept. Whereas some ERP studies have found evidence for a semantic richness continuum from abstract concepts, to concrete concepts with few features, to concrete concepts with several features, other studies have not. The present study assessed the effects of NOF (within concrete concepts) and concreteness (concrete vs. abstract concepts), on ERP amplitudes and behavioural decision latencies during a concrete/abstract decision task. It is important we also manipulated object domain, which has been found to influence ERP amplitude and topography. High and low NOF concepts were selected from animal and nonliving thing categories and all four conditions were matched on several potential confounds. We show that although decision latencies support a semantic richness continuum, electrophysiological activity does not. Whereas concrete concepts produce a larger negativity than abstract concepts, low NOF concepts are associated with larger negativities than high NOF concepts. We also replicate an increased posterior positivity for processing animal concepts, and report an interaction between object domain and semantic richness such that the NOF effect is larger within animal concepts.

There are many ways to be rich: Effects of three measures of semantic richness on visual word recognition

Previous studies have reported that semantic richness facilitates visual word recognition (see, e.g., Buchanan, Westbury, & Burgess, 2001; Pexman, Holyk, & Monfils, 2003). We compared three semantic richness measures--number of semantic neighbors (NSN), the number of words appearing in similar lexical contexts; number of features (NF), the number of features listed for a word's referent; and contextual dispersion (CD), the distribution of a word's occurrences across content areas-to determine their abilities to account for response time and error variance in lexical decision and semantic categorization tasks. NF and CD accounted for unique variance in both tasks, whereas NSN accounted for unique variance only in the lexical decision task. Moreover, each measure showed a different pattern of relative contribution across the tasks. Our results provide new clues about how words are represented and suggest that word recognition models need to accommodate each of these influences.

Monolingual and bilingual recognition of regular and irregular English verbs: Sensitivity to form similarity varies with first language experience

We used a cross-modal priming procedure to explore the processing of irregular and regular English verb forms in both monolinguals and bilinguals (Serbian-English, Chinese-English). Materials included irregular nested stem (drawn–DRAW), irregular change stem (ran–RUN), and regular past tense–present tense verb pairs that were either low (guided–GUIDE) or high (pushed–PUSH) in resonance, a measure of semantic richness. Overall, semantic richness of irregular verbs (nested and irregular change) and of regular verbs (high and low resonance) was matched. Native speakers of English revealed comparable facilitation across regularity and greater facilitation for nested than change stem irregulars. Like native speakers, Serbian, but not Chinese bilinguals matched for proficiency, showed facilitation due to form overlap between irregular past and present tense forms with a nested stem. Unlike native speakers, neither group showed reliable facilitation to stem change irregulars. Results demonstrate the influence of first language on inflectional processing in a second language.