Semantic relations and compound transparency: A regression study in CARIN theory

Abstract

According to the CARIN theory of Gagn? and Shoben (1997), conceptual relations play an important role in compound interpretation. This study develops three measures gauging the role of conceptual relations, and pits these measures against measures based on latent semantic analysis (Landauer & Dumais, 1997). The CARIN measures successfully predict response latencies in a familiarity categorization task, in a semantic transparency task, and in visual lexical decision. Of the measures based on latent semantic analysis, only a measure orthogonal to the conceptual relations, which instead gauges the extent to which the concepts for the compound?s head and the compound itself are discriminated, also reached significance. Results further indicate that in tasks requiring careful assessment of the meaning of the compound, general knowledge of conceptual relations plays a central role, whereas in the lexical decision task, attention shifts to co-activated meanings and the specifics of the conceptual relations realized in the compound?s modifier family.

Accentuate the Positive: Semantic Access in English Compounds

“…We argue that the present pattern of results is consistent with the premises of the naive discriminative learning account of morphological processing (Baayen et al, 2011; Pham and Baayen, in press). On this approach, orthographic (and phonological) cues are directly mapped onto meanings, without the mediation of morphemes as a representational level.…”

“…The model proposes that orthographic cues simultaneously activate a variety of meanings, including the meaning of the complex word, meanings of its morphemes, and meanings of non-morphemic strings that constitute lexical units (Bowers et al, 2005), e.g., shoestring, shoe, string, hoe, and ring. Pham and Baayen (in press) further suggest that selective attention is directed toward the meaning of the entire word (shoestring), with only marginal attentional resources allocated to other co-activated meanings. This contrasts with staged architectures of morphological processing, in which the compound meaning is singled out from competitors through the processes of interactive activation and inhibition of hierarchically organized units (morphemes and complex words).…”

“…Second, focusing on meanings of morphemes into which a complex word can be decomposed is inefficient, because no compound meaning is truly compositional and even highly transparent compounds, e.g., boathouse , are not mere sums of the meanings of their constituents (Kuperman et al, submitted; Pham and Baayen, in press). For example, the Merriam-Webster dictionary provides the following two definitions for the word boat : (1a) a small vessel for travel on water, (b) ship; (2) a boat-shaped container, utensil, or device (e.g., a gravy boat, a laboratory boat).…”

“…To sum up, selective attention to compound meaning is preferred on the grounds of processing efficiency over attention divided over a gamut of co-activated meanings, much like a situation of a “car driver on a busy street focusing on a traffic light: only one object from a rich array of objects in the visual scene is attended” (Pham and Baayen, in press). If attentional focus on whole-words, including compounds, is indeed the driving force of word processing, we expect data to support the following two predictions.…”

“…These include semantic transparency (e.g., gaged as a subjective rating of how predictable the meaning of a complex word ( department ) is given the meanings of its parts ( depart and ment ); e.g., Libben et al, 2003), semantic similarity (gauged via the Latent Semantic Analysis measure of semantic distance between complex words and constituents; e.g., Landauer and Dumais, 1997; Ji et al, 2011; Marelli and Luzzatti, 2012; Kuperman et al, submitted), and relational structure (gauged as a type and relative frequency of the specific conceptual association between constituents in a complex word, e.g., teacup is a cup FOR tea; see Gagné and Shoben, 1997; Pham and Baayen, in press). A large body of masked or unmasked priming lexical decision studies choose semantic transparency and similarity as their critical experimental manipulation.…”