Concreteness and disagreement: Comment on Pollock (2018)

Neath, Ian; Surprenant, Aimée M.

doi:10.3758/s13421-019-00992-8

Cited by 15 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…One concern with our results may be that when two sets of stimuli are equated on so many dimensions, as was the case in our experiments, the one remaining dimension on which they differ will no longer be sufficient to produce an effect. Although this is possible and cannot be ruled out for our data, we do note that a number of other studies using similarly highly controlled stimuli have found effects of frequency (Neath & Surprenant, 2019), concreteness (Neath & Surprenant, 2020), neighbourhood size (Guitard, Gabel, Saint-Aubin, Surprenant, & Neath, 2018), and visual similarity (Chubala, Guitard, Neath, Saint-Aubin, & Surprenant, 2020) in serial recall tests.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 68%

Valence does not affect serial recall.

Bireta¹,

Guitard²,

Neath³

et al. 2021

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne

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Despite being the prototypical test of short-term/working memory, immediate serial recall is affected by numerous lexical and long-term memory factors. Within this large literature, very few studies have examined whether performance on the task is affected by valence, the extent to which a word is viewed as positive or negative. Whereas the NEVER model (Bowen, Kark, & Kensinger, 2018) makes the general prediction that negative words will be remembered better than positive words, two previous studies using serial recall have reported that positive words are better remembered than negative words. Three experiments reassessed whether valence affects immediate serial recall using stimuli equated on multiple dimensions, including both arousal and dominance. Over the 3 experiments, with 3 different sets of stimuli, we found no differences in either accuracy or various error measures as a function of valence. The data suggest that there is no effect of valence on an immediate serial recall task when potentially confounding dimensions are controlled. Public Significance StatementValence refers to whether a word is generally viewed as positive or negative and is thought to affect memory. However, when positive and negative words were equated on other dimensions known to affect memory, including frequency and semantic relatedness, there was no difference in memory performance on a commonly used measure of STM, serial recall.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 68%

Valence does not affect serial recall.

Bireta¹,

Guitard²,

Neath³

et al. 2021

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne

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“…4The abstract and concrete words did differ in the mean standard deviation of the concreteness rating; however, Neath and Surprenant (2020) have shown this dimension does not affect the concreteness effect, at least in serial recall.…”

mentioning

confidence: 92%

“…The word tilth was omitted from the low-frequency pool because it was not in any of the databases and because none of the authors knew what it meant.4 The abstract and concrete words did differ in the mean standard deviation of the concreteness rating; however,Neath and Surprenant (2020) have shown this dimension does not affect the concreteness effect, at least in serial recall.STIMULUS-BASED MIRROR EFFECTS REVISITED…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Stimulus-based mirror effects revisited.

Neath¹,

Hockley²,

Ensor³

2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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The mirror effect is the finding that in recognition tests, a manipulation that increases the hit rate also decreases the false alarm rate. For example, low frequency words have a higher hit rate and a lower false alarm rate than high frequency words. Because the mirror effect is held to be a regularity of memory, it has had a pronounced influence on theories of recognition. We took advantage of the recent increase in the number of linguistic databases to create sets of stimuli that differed on one dimension (contextual diversity, frequency, or concreteness) but were more fully equated on other dimensions known to affect memory. Experiment 1 (contextual diversity), Experiment 3 (frequency), and Experiment 5 (concreteness) found no evidence of a mirror effect. We also conducted parallel experiments which used previously published stimuli that could not avail of the new databases and which therefore contained confounds. Experiment 2 (contextual diversity), Experiment 4 (frequency), and Experiment 6 (concreteness) all resulted in mirror effects. If this pattern of results is replicable, it has broad implications for theories of recognition, which typically view the mirror effect as a benchmark finding. Unfortunately, few articles on the mirror effect include the stimuli, rendering the past literature of little use in testing this hypothesis. We encourage researchers to create and assess other pools of highly controlled stimuli to establish whether the stimulus-based mirror effect obtains when confounds are eliminated or whether it is due to the presence of these confounds.

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“…E.g. it is assumed that concreteness influences learning, recognition memory and the speed of visual recognition, reading and spelling (Spreen and Schulz, 1966;Hargis and Gickling, 1978;Sadoski et al, 2004;Palmer et al, 2013;Neath and Surprenant, 2020). Moreover, studies conducted on abstract and concrete words also found that the participants remembered concrete words better than the abstract words (for an overview of various studies see e.g.…”

Section: Concretenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Geometry of Concreteness

Wartena¹

2022

Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP

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In this paper we investigate how concreteness and abstractness are represented in word embedding spaces. We use data for English and German, and show that concreteness and abstractness can be determined independently and turn out to be completely opposite directions in the embedding space. Various methods can be used to determine the direction of concreteness, always resulting in roughly the same vector.Though concreteness is a central aspect of the meaning of words and can be detected clearly in embedding spaces, it seems not as easy to subtract or add concreteness to words to obtain other words or word senses like e.g. can be done with a semantic property like gender.

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Concreteness and disagreement: Comment on Pollock (2018)

Cited by 15 publications

References 18 publications

Valence does not affect serial recall.

Valence does not affect serial recall.

Stimulus-based mirror effects revisited.

On the Geometry of Concreteness

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