The organization of adjectival meanings

Gross, Derek; Fischer, Ute; Miller, George A.

doi:10.1016/0749-596x(89)90030-2

Cited by 88 publications

(66 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Adults process the relationship between two adjectives more slowly when they are not direct antonyms (e.g. "strong -frail" is processed more slowly than "strong -weak") (Gross, Fischer, & Miller, 1989). We thus hypothesized that presenting the contrasting opinions about palatability as direct polar opposites would allow children to more easily recognize the difference.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children's use of adult testimony to guide food selection

et al. 2008

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We hypothesized that children's reliance on adults' testimony regarding food choices would diminish when adults were shown to be unreliable informants by expressing liking for foods the children disliked. In 3 studies, 3-to 6-year-old children observed an adult expressing liking for food and nonfood items that were either the same as or opposite the child's stated hedonic assessments. Even after having observed an adult express liking for stimuli the children disliked, children still selected the item which the adult identified as hedonically positive. Children were more likely to select the stimulus identified as hedonically positive by the adult when the stimulus was food (as opposed to non-food), and when the adult's hedonic assessment was provided as an absolute ("I think this is yummy.") as opposed to a comparative statement ("I like this one better."). The results imply that an adult's identification of a food as hedonically positive serves as an important guide to children's food selection, even when children recognize that adults have very different hedonic assessments of foods from themselves. Providing information to children that a food is palatable in absolute terms also appears to shape children's food selection more powerfully than providing the information in comparative terms.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children's use of adult testimony to guide food selection

et al. 2008

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“…And something is known about the way that traits (and other adjectives) are organized in the lexicon (Gross, Fischer, & Miller, 1989). But very little is known about the implications that people may draw from STIs about a person.…”

Section: The Implications Of Stismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, traits are adjectives, and Gross et al (1989) have demonstrated that adjectives are organized in the lexicon as opposites. Thus, STIs might have implications for antonym trait ratings of an actor.…”

Section: The Implications Of Stismentioning

confidence: 99%

Spontaneous trait inferences are bound to actors' faces: Evidence from a false recognition paradigm.

Todorov

Uleman²

2002

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

225

268

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A false recognition paradigm showed that spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) are bound to the person performing a trait-implying behavior. In 6 experiments, participants memorized faces and behavioral sentences. When faces were paired with implied traits in a recognition test, participants falsely recognized these traits more often than unrelated traits paired with the same faces or the same traits paired with familiar faces. The effect was obtained for a large set of behaviors (120), each presented for 5 s, and for behaviors that participants did not subsequently recognize or recall. Antonyms of the implied traits were falsely recognized less often than unrelated traits, suggesting that STIs have extended implications. Explicit person-trait judgments predicted both false recognition and response times for implied traits.

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“…Clark (1969) studied 'positive' adjectives and found that the positive member tall or long was less complex and more accessible than the 'negative' member short. Gross, Fischer and Miller (1989) studied the lexical organization of antonyms, claiming that that all predicate adjectives are mentally organized as antonyms either directly or as synonyms to an adjective with a direct antonym. In visual world studies, Sedivy, Chambers, Tanenhaus, and Carlson (1999) have argued that scalar adjectives are used when there is a contrast set.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Scale structure: Processing minimum standard and maximum standard scalar adjectives

2008

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Gradable adjectives denote a function that takes an object and returns a measure of the degree to which the object possesses some gradable property (Kennedy, 1999). Scales, ordered sets of degrees, have begun to be studied systematically in semantics (Kennedy, to appear, Kennedy & McNally, 2005, Rotstein & Winter, 2004. We report four experiments designed to investigate the processing of absolute adjectives with a maximum standard (e.g., clean) and their minimum standard antonyms (dirty). The central hypothesis is that the denotation of an absolute adjective introduces a 'standard value' on a scale as part of the normal comprehension of a sentence containing the adjective (the "Obligatory Scale" hypothesis). In line with the predictions of Kennedy and McNally (2005) and Rotstein and Winter (2004), maximum standard adjectives and minimum standard adjectives systematically differ from each other when they are combined with minimizing modifiers like slightly, as indicated by speeded acceptability judgments. An eye movement recording study shows that, as predicted by the Obligatory Scale hypothesis, the penalty due to combining slightly with a maximum standard adjective can be observed during the processing of the sentence; the penalty is not the result of some after-the-fact inferencing mechanism. Further, a type of 'quantificational variability effect' may be observed when a quantificational adverb (mostly) is combined with a minimum standard adjective in sentences like The dishes are mostly dirty, which may receive either a degree interpretation (e.g. 80% dirty) or a quantity interpretation (e.g., 80% of the dishes are dirty). The quantificational variability results provide suggestive support for the Obligatory Scale hypothesis by showing that the standard of a scalar adjective influences the preferred interpretation of other constituents in the sentence.Gradable adjectives like wet or straight or dirty have been analyzed as denoting a function (technically designated a function of semantic type ) that takes an object and returns a measure of the degree to which the object possesses some gradable property (e.g., the property of being clean; Kennedy, 1999, 2006, Kennedy & McNally, 2005. Most psycholinguistic research on adjectives (see brief review below) has focused on relative adjectives, like tall or expensive. The values on the scale of such adjectives depend heavily on the noun that they modify (an expensive wine is much cheaper than an expensive car). In contrast, we will focus here on absolute adjectives, and in particular, absolute gradable adjectives that have antonyms such as clean-dirty, healthy-sick and dead-alive. There is of course some context dependence in the interpretation of these adjectives too (we impose stricter standards of cleanliness on a clean plate than on a clean floor) but this has been argued to be a matter of 'precisification,' imposing stricter standards when precision is important, rather than of 'vagueness' (see Kennedy, to appear, for the distinction and examples o...

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The organization of adjectival meanings

Cited by 88 publications

References 7 publications

Children's use of adult testimony to guide food selection

Children's use of adult testimony to guide food selection

Spontaneous trait inferences are bound to actors' faces: Evidence from a false recognition paradigm.

Scale structure: Processing minimum standard and maximum standard scalar adjectives

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