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Experience-driven meaning affects lexical choices during language production
Anne Vogt1,2, Barbara Kaup3, Rasha Abdel Rahman1,2
1Department of Psychology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)
|September 5, 2022
Summary
Spatial meaning influences word choice during language production. Our study shows that the typical locations of words
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Psycholinguistics
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Sensorimotor experiences significantly shape meaning comprehension.
- The role of these experiences in language production remains under-explored.
- Investigating how spatial information influences spoken word selection is crucial.
Purpose of the Study:
- To examine if spatial cues affect lexical choices in spoken language production.
- To determine if sentence context's spatial characteristics guide word selection.
- To understand the influence of 'location in space' as a meaning dimension.
Main Methods:
- Two experiments involving participants completing sentence fragments with spoken nouns.
- Visual presentation of words with ascending or descending directional cues.
- Analysis of lexical choices using distributional semantic similarity measures.
Main Results:
- Physical directional cues (ascending/descending) did not impact lexical choices.
- Produced nouns' referents' typical spatial locations aligned with sentence contexts.
- The meaning dimension of 'location in space' significantly guided lexical selection.
Conclusions:
- Language production is influenced by the spatial meaning of words.
- Findings support experientially grounded and usage-based language processing theories.
- Contributes to a comprehensive understanding of meaning facets in language production.
Keywords:
Language productionexperiential traceshybrid modelslanguage groundinglexical selectionsemantic processingMore Related Videos
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