Models that represent meaning as high-dimensional numerical vectors—such as latent semantic analysis (LSA), hyperspace analogue to language (HAL), bound encoding of the aggregate language environment (BEAGLE), topic models, global vectors (GloVe), and word2vec—have been introduced as extremely powerful machine-learning proxies for human semantic representations and have seen an explosive rise in popularity over the past 2 decades. However, despite their considerable advancements and spread in the cognitive sciences, one can observe problems associated with the adequate presentation and understanding of some of their features. Indeed, when these models are examined from a cognitive perspective, a number of unfounded arguments tend to appear in the psychological literature. In this article, we review the most common of these arguments and discuss (a) what exactly these models represent at the implementational level and their plausibility as a cognitive theory, (b) how they deal with various aspects of meaning such as polysemy or compositionality, and (c) how they relate to the debate on embodied and grounded cognition. We identify common misconceptions that arise as a result of incomplete descriptions, outdated arguments, and unclear distinctions between theory and implementation of the models. We clarify and amend these points to provide a theoretical basis for future research and discussions on vector models of semantic representation.

In this article, the R package LSAfun is presented. This package enables a variety of functions and computations based on Vector Semantic Models such as Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) Landauer, Foltz and Laham (Discourse Processes 25:259-284, 1998), which are procedures to obtain a high-dimensional vector representation for words (and documents) from a text corpus. Such representations are thought to capture the semantic meaning of a word (or document) and allow for semantic similarity comparisons between words to be calculated as the cosine of the angle between their associated vectors. LSAfun uses precreated LSA spaces and provides functions for (a) Similarity Computations between words, word lists, and documents; (b) Neighborhood Computations, such as obtaining a word's or document's most similar words, (c) plotting such a neighborhood, as well as similarity structures for any word lists, in a two-or three-dimensional approximation using Multidimensional Scaling, (d) Applied Functions, such as computing the coherence of a text, answering multiple choice questions and producing generic text summaries; and (e) Composition Methods for obtaining vector representations for two-word phrases. The purpose of this package is to allow convenient access to computations based on LSA.

Scoring divergent‐thinking response sets has always been challenging because such responses are not only open‐ended in terms of number of ideas, but each idea may also be expressed by a varying number of concepts and, thus, by a varying number of words (elaboration). While many current studies have attempted to score the semantic distance in divergent‐thinking responses by applying latent semantic analysis (LSA), it is known from other areas of research that LSA‐based approaches are biased according to the number of words in a response. Thus, the current article aimed to identify and demonstrate this elaboration bias in LSA‐based divergent‐thinking scores by means of a simulation. In addition, we show that this elaboration bias can be reduced by removing the stop words (for example, and, or, for and so forth) prior to analysis. Furthermore, the residual bias after stop word removal can be reduced by simulation‐based corrections. Finally, we give an empirical illustration for alternate uses and consequences tasks. Results suggest that when both stop word removal and simulation‐based bias correction are applied, convergent validity should be expected to be highest.

In distributional semantics models (DSMs) such as latent semantic analysis (LSA), words are represented as vectors in a high-dimensional vector space. This allows for computing word similarities as the cosine of the angle between two such vectors. In two experiments, we investigated whether LSA cosine similarities predict priming effects, in that higher cosine similarities are associated with shorter reaction times (RTs). Critically, we applied a pseudo-random procedure in generating the item material to ensure that we directly manipulated LSA cosines as an independent variable. We employed two lexical priming experiments with lexical decision tasks (LDTs). In Experiment 1 we presented participants with 200 different prime words, each paired with one unique target. We found a significant effect of cosine similarities on RTs. The same was true for Experiment 2, where we reversed the prime-target order (primes of Experiment 1 were targets in Experiment 2, and vice versa). The results of these experiments confirm that LSA cosine similarities can predict priming effects, supporting the view that they are psychologically relevant. The present study thereby provides evidence for qualifying LSA cosine similarities not only as a linguistic measure, but also as a cognitive similarity measure. However, it is also shown that other DSMs can outperform LSA as a predictor of priming effects.

Effects of semantic transparency, reflected in processing differences between semantically transparent (teabag) and opaque (ladybird) compounds, have received considerable attention in the investigation of the role of constituents in compound processing. However, previous studies have yielded inconsistent results. In the present article, we argue that this is due to semantic transparency’s often being conceptualized only as the semantic relatedness between the compound and constituent meanings as separate units. This neglects the fact that compounds are inherently productive constructions. We argue that compound processing is routinely impacted by a compositional process aimed at computing a compositional meaning, which would cause compositional semantic transparency effects to emerge in compound processing. We employ recent developments in compositional distributional semantics to quantify relatedness- as well as composition-based semantic transparency measures and use these to predict lexical decision times in a large-scale data set. We observed semantic transparency effects on compound processing that are not captured in relatedness terms but only by adopting a compositional perspective.

Theories of embodied cognition assume that concepts are grounded in non-linguistic, sensorimotor experience. In support of this assumption, previous studies have shown that upwards response movements are faster than downwards movements after participants have been presented with words whose referents are typically located in the upper vertical space (and vice versa for downwards responses). This is taken as evidence that processing these words reactivates sensorimotor experiential traces. This congruency effect was also found for novel words, after participants learned these words as labels for novel objects that they encountered either in their upper or lower visual field. While this indicates that direct experience with a word's referent is sufficient to evoke said congruency effects, the present study investigates whether this direct experience is also a necessary condition. To this end, we conducted five experiments in which participants learned novel words from purely linguistic input: Novel words were presented in pairs with real up- or down-words (Experiment 1); they were presented in natural sentences where they replaced these real words (Experiment 2); they were presented as new labels for these real words (Experiment 3); and they were presented as labels for novel combined concepts based on these real words (Experiment 4 and 5). In all five experiments, we did not find any congruency effects elicited by the novel words; however, participants were always able to make correct explicit judgements about the vertical dimension associated to the novel words. These results suggest that direct experience is necessary for reactivating experiential traces, but this reactivation is not a necessary condition for understanding (in the sense of storing and accessing) the corresponding aspects of word meaning.

Noun compounds, consisting of two nouns (the head and the modifier) that are combined into a single concept, differ in terms of their plausibility: school bus is a more plausible compound than saddle olive. The present study investigates which factors influence the plausibility of attested and novel noun compounds. Distributional Semantic Models (DSMs) are used to obtain formal (vector) representations of word meanings, and compositional methods in DSMs are employed to obtain such representations for noun compounds. From these representations, different plausibility measures are computed. Three of those measures contribute in predicting the plausibility of noun compounds: The relatedness between the meaning of the head noun and the compound (Head Proximity), the relatedness between the meaning of modifier noun and the compound (Modifier Proximity), and the similarity between the head noun and the modifier noun (Constituent Similarity). We find non-linear interactions between Head Proximity and Modifier Proximity, as well as between Modifier Proximity and Constituent Similarity. Furthermore, Constituent Similarity interacts non-linearly with the familiarity with the compound. These results suggest that a compound is perceived as more plausible if it can be categorized as an instance of the category denoted by the head noun, if the contribution of the modifier to the compound meaning is clear but not redundant, and if the constituents are sufficiently similar in cases where this contribution is not clear. Furthermore, compounds are perceived to be more plausible if they are more familiar, but mostly for cases where the relation between the constituents is less clear.

In its strongest formulation, grounded cognition claims that “concepts are made up of sensorimotor information”. Following such equivalence, perceptual properties of objects should consistently influence processing even in purely linguistic tasks, where perceptual information is neither solicited nor required. Previous studies tested this prediction in semantic priming tasks, but they did not observe perceptual influence on participants’ performances. However, those findings suffer from critical shortcomings, which may have prevented potential visually grounded/perceptual effects from being detected. Here, we further investigated this topic by applying an innovative method expected to increase the sensitivity in detecting such perceptual effects. Specifically, we adopted an objective, data-driven computational approach to independently quantify vision-based and language-based similarities for prime-target pairs on a continuous scale. We tested whether these measures predicted behavioral performance in a semantic priming mega-study, with various experimental settings. Vision-based similarity was found to facilitate performances, but a dissociation between vision-based and language-based effects was also observed. Thus, in line with grounded cognition, perceptual properties can facilitate word processing in purely linguistic tasks, but the behavioral dissociation challenges extreme claims of sensorimotor and conceptual equivalence.