Examining assortativity in the mental lexicon: Evidence from word associations

Abstract

Words are characterized by a variety of lexical and psychological properties, such as their part of speech, wordfrequency, concreteness, or affectivity. In this study, we examine how these properties relate to a word's connectivity in the mental lexicon, the structure containing a person's knowledge of words. In particular, we examine the extent to which these properties display assortative mixing, that is, the extent to which words in the lexicon are more likely to be connected to words that share these properties. We investigated three types of word properties: 1) subjective word covariates: valence, dominance, arousal, and concreteness; 2) lexical information: part of speech; and 3) distributional word properties: age-of-acquisition, word frequency, and contextual diversity. We assessed which of these factors exhibit assortativity using a word association task, where the probability of producing a certain response to a cue is a measure of the associative strength between the cue and response in the mental lexicon. Our results show that the extent to which these aspects exhibit assortativity varies considerably, with a high cue-response correspondence on valence, dominance, arousal, concreteness, and part of speech, indicating that these factors correspond to the words people deem as related. In contrast, we find that cues and responses show only little correspondence on word frequency, contextual diversity, and age-of-acquisition, indicating that, compared to subjective and lexical word covariates, distributional properties exhibit only little assortativity in the mental lexicon. Possible theoretical accounts and implications of these findings are discussed.

Estimating affective word covariates using word association data

“…The extrapolation methods we describe would conceivably work on other psychologically relevant dimensions as well, as long as these dimensions are captured by the associative technique, that is, as long as the associations people give to a certain word are in some way related to the cue's or association's value on that dimension. Existing research suggests that other examples of word covariates that could likely be predicted based on association data may include concreteness (the extent to which words refer to something perceptible; see Mandera et al, 2015, or Van Rensbergen, Storms, & De Deyne, 2015, age of acquisition (the age at which a word was learned; see Mandera et al, 2015), or dimensions relevant to personality profiles (e.g., openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, or neuroticism; see Yarkoni, 2010, or Park et al, 2015.…”

Forma Mentis Networks Reconstruct How Italian High Schoolers and International STEM Experts Perceive Teachers, Students, Scientists, and School

“…This comparison indicates that the degree distribution partially induces but cannot fully explain word clustering. Additional cognitive phenomena, such as semantic similarity [22], might foster triangle formation and global clustering despite network construction (where recalled words are linked only to the cue and not between themselves).…”

“…Empirical and theoretical research in the cognitive sciences identified these mental representations of knowledge as components of a way more complex system called mental lexicon, a repository of knowledge apt at information acquisition, processing, and use [21]. The recent adoption of network science tools has shown how the large-scale, associative structure of word knowledge in the mental lexicon is highly informative of a wide variety of cognitive processes such as lexical processing [19,22,23,24], learning and cognitive development [25,26,27], text structuring and writing styles [28,29,30,31], creativity [32,33], and expertise levels in specific domains [34,5]. Analogously, forma mentis networks act as approximated reconstructions on the mental constructs built by individuals in their associative mental lexicon, representing their perceptions of the outer world [16,17].…”

How Polysemy Affects Concreteness Ratings: The Case of Metaphor

“…Concreteness ratings (e.g., Brysbaert, Warriner, & Kuperman, ; Spreen & Schultz, ; Toglia & Battig, ) are a popular approach used in a variety of disciplines to operationalize the difference between concrete and abstract words and concepts, including in cognitive science (Connell & Lynott, ; Siakaluk, Pexman, Sears, Wilson, Locheed, & Owen, ), (experimental) psychology (Kaushanskaya & Rechtzigel, ; Pexman, Heard, Lloyd, & Yap, ), psycholinguistics (Ferreira, Göbel, Hymers, & Ellis, ; Van Rensbergen, Storms, & De Deyne, ), and cognitive linguistics (Dunn, ).…”