Keystrokes: A practical exploration of semantic drift in timed word association tasks

Abstract

This study investigates the phenomena of semantic drift through the lenses of language and situated simulation (LASS) and the word frequency effect (WFE) within a timed word association task. Our primary objectives were to determine whether semantic drift can be identified over the short time (25 seconds) of a free word association task (a predicted corollary of LASS), and whether more frequent terms are generated earlier in the process (as expected due to the WFE). We hypothesized that terms generated later in the task (fourth time quartile) would be semantically more distant (cosine similarity) from the cue word than those generated earlier (first quartile), indicating semantic drift. Additionally, we explored the WFE by hypothesizing that earlier generated words would be more frequent and less diverse. Utilizing a dataset matched with GloVe 300B word embeddings, we analysed semantic distances among 1569 unique term pairs for five cues words (tree, dog, quality, plastic and love) across different time quartiles. Our results supported the presence of semantic drift, with significant evidence of within-participant, semantic drift from the first to fourth quartile. Slightly greater sparsity was also found in later stages, suggesting further evidence of semantic drift, though the effects for sparsity were small. In terms of the WFE, we observed a notable decrease in the diversity of terms generated earlier in the task, while more unique terms (greater diversity and relative uniqueness) were generated in the 4th time quartile, aligning with our hypothesis that more frequently used words dominate early stages of a word association task. We also found the most frequent terms were semantically closer on average than the least frequent terms generated. Theoretically, our study contributes to the understanding of LASS and the WFE. It suggests that semantic drift might serve as a scalable indicator of the invocation of language versus simulation systems in LASS and might also be used to explore cognition within word association tasks more generally. The findings also add a temporal and relational dimension to the WFE. Practically, our research highlights the utility of word association tasks in understanding semantic drift and the diffusion of word usage over a sub-minute task, arguably the shortest practically feasible timeframe, offering a scalable method to explore group and individual changes in semantic relationships, whether via the targeted diffusion of influence in a marketing campaign, or seeking to understand differences in cognition more generally. Possible practical uses and opportunities for future research are discussed.