Psycholinguistic estimates of 3000 words of Croatian: concreteness and imageability

Stantić, Anita Peti; Anđel, Maja; Keresteš, Gordana; Ljubešić, Nikola; Stanojević, Mateusz-Milan; Tonković, Mirjana

doi:10.22210/suvlin.2018.085.05

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…vrag “devil”, mrtvac “corpse”), based on the differences in morphological marking of masculine nouns. Preliminary results of the first round of data collection, focusing on the dimensions of concreteness and imageability and testing the dual-coding theory, were published in Croatian (Peti-Stantić et al, 2018 ). In this paper, we present the complete database, i.e.…”

Section: Study 1: Human Ratingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…word length and corpus frequency) are also frequently coded in databases. However, word class has rarely been systematically treated, although it has been found that words belonging to different word classes exhibit differences in imageability (Bird et al, 2001 ; Simonsen et al, 2013 ) and concreteness (Peti-Stantić et al, 2018 ). This is not surprising if word class is considered meaningful, i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Croatian psycholinguistic database: Estimates for 6000 nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs

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Psycholinguistic databases containing ratings of concreteness, imageability, age of acquisition, and subjective frequency are used in psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic studies which require words as stimuli. Linguistic characteristics (e.g. word length, corpus frequency) are frequently coded, but word class is seldom systematically treated, although there are indications of its significance for imageability and concreteness. This paper presents the Croatian Psycholinguistic Database (CPD; available at: 10.17234/megahr.2019.hpb), containing 6000 Croatian nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, rated for concreteness, imageability, age of acquisition, and subjective frequency. Moreover, we present computationally obtained extrapolations of concreteness and imageability to the remainder of the Croatian lexicon (available at: https://github.com/megahr/lexicon/blob/master/predictions/hr_c_i.predictions.txt). In the two studies presented here, we explore the significance of word class for concreteness and imageability in human and computationally obtained ratings. The observed correlations in the CPD indicate correspondences between psycholinguistic measures expected from the literature. Word classes exhibit differences in subjective frequency, age of acquisition, concreteness and imageability, with significant differences between nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. In the computational study which focused on concreteness and imageability, concreteness obtained higher correlations with human ratings than imageability, and the system underpredicted the concreteness of nouns, and overpredicted the concreteness of adjectives and adverbs. Overall, this suggests that word class contains schematic conceptual and distributional information. Schematic conceptual content seems to be more significant in human ratings of concreteness and less significant in computationally obtained ratings, where distributional information seems to play a more significant role. This suggests that word class differences should be theoretically explored.

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Section: Study 1: Human Ratingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Croatian psycholinguistic database: Estimates for 6000 nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs

et al. 2021

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“…The stimuli set consisted of 40 words and 40 phonotactically legal pseudowords (80 trials) which were presented one at a time, with a fixation cross appearing after each stimulus (delay 500 ms). Word stimuli consisted of 20 highly concrete words (mean concreteness ≥ 4, assessed on a five-point scale; e.g., olovka 'pencil') and 20 highly abstract words (mean concreteness ≤ 2; e.g., mišljenje 'opinion') from the Croatian Psycholinguistic Database (Hrvatska psiholingvistička baza; Peti-Stantić et al 2018, 2021. LD is a common test of word recognition.…”

Section: Pebl Lexical Decision Task (Ld)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive performance and specific aspects of language processing are associated with Oldowan-like chert flaking and retouch

Gabrić¹,

Banda²,

Karavanić³

2021

Preprint

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A vast amount of literature suggests a co-evolutionary relationship between Palaeolithic stone toolmaking, and cognition and specifically language. However, empirical data remain limited to indirect findings of neurophysiological studies. Furthermore, most Oldowan studies have used chert and have not investigated retouch, even though quartz and lava were predominant raw materials during periods of chert unavailability, and even though chert was disproportionately more frequently used for retouch compared to other raw materials during periods of chert availability, at least in the Olduvai Gorge. The study recruited 13 young adults with no prior experience in knapping. Subjects were taught by an experienced knapper to produce quartz choppers and chert sidescrapers in either a verbal or gestural condition. Two raters rated on a 5-point scale the subjects’ performances on specific steps of the two stone toolmaking tasks. In a post-experimental interview, subjects stated which aspects of the tasks they preferred or disfavored. Subjects also performed on a neuropsychological battery encompassing visuospatial, executive functioning, and linguistic tasks. Given the small sample size, the results should be regarded as exploratory and preliminary. Our results are further limited to the early acquisition phase and may not reflect processes in modern experienced knappers. Descriptive data suggested better performance across all stone toolmaking variables in the verbal compared to gestural condition, but only flake quality on the sidescraper task was significantly different between groups. Analyses of the stone toolmaking variables suggested subjects perceived quartz and chert flaking very differently. Correlational and other analyses suggested that quartz chopper manufacture was not associated with cognitive performance. Conversely, chert flaking and retouch were strongly associated with visuospatial working memory, showing that subjects with a higher memory span produced better chert flakes and retouch. Retouch only was moderately associated with executive functioning measures, showing subjects who made fewer errors on the tasks were better on retouch. Specific aspects of chert flaking were also associated with verbal fluency performance, showing, among others, moderate and strong positive associations with the productivity and rate of production of syntactically transitive verbs on action fluency. Evolutionary implications can be drawn from our research only if we controversially assume similar results would have been obtained had we tested early hominins and not modern humans. Following this axiom, our results suggest that Oldowan hominins relied on modern-like visuospatial working memory during chert flaking and retouch, and, to a lesser degree, modern-like executive functioning during chert retouch. This is contrary to previous Oldowan studies suggesting no involvement of executive functioning during Oldowan-like flaking. Results from the linguistic tasks controversially suggest that some of the prerequisites for aspects of action language and syntactic transitivity (verb-object phrases) in modern humans were to some degree present in Oldowan hominin populations. Because Olduvai Gorge hominins readily incorporated chert for stone toolmaking in periods of chert availability, our results suggest that these cognitive capacities were phylogenetically not related to chert knapping. Finally, we propose that the quality of performance on Oldowan flaking and retouch may not reflect the full level of cognitive capacities of Oldowan populations. We provide the first direct evidence for an association between Palaeolithic stone toolmaking and cognitive performance in modern humans, while previous studies have inferred cognitive processes from neuroimaging data. We also provide the first direct evidence for an association between Palaeolithic stone toolmaking, and action language and simple syntactic transitivity in modern humans.

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Stem overgeneralizations in the acquisition of Croatian verbal morphology: Evidence from parental questionnaires

Hržica,

Bošnjak Botica,

Košutar

2023

Word Structure

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Studies on verbal overgeneralization often focus on languages with low morphological complexity. The Croatian conjugational system exhibits varying degrees of complexity, and this complexity is not primarily based on the number of inflectional morphemes, but on an elaborate system of stem changes. During early language development, children face the difficult task of acquiring this system, using overgeneralized forms to overcome its complexity. To date, studies have used a corpus-based method to retrieve overgeneralizations in child language, which has had limited success in capturing this phenomenon. The aim of this study was to investigate the production of overgeneralized verb forms in Croatian monolingual children aged 2;6 to 5;11 using a questionnaire in which parents report overgeneralizations used by their children. We tested the relationship between the production of overgeneralized forms and features of the input language (token frequency and class size). We hypothesized that the rate of overgeneralizations will depend on input language features, i.e. a higher rate of overgeneralizations for infrequent verbs and for verbs with smaller class size. The items selected for the questionnaire are the verbs with stem change used by parents in the longitudinal Croatian corpus of child language. Parents report overgeneralized forms in all verb classes, and verb frequency and class size negatively correlate with the proportion of overgeneralizations. Our results show that children gradually abstract morphological systems in a way that is highly sensitive to the properties of the input.

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Psycholinguistic estimates of 3000 words of Croatian: concreteness and imageability

Cited by 3 publications

References 16 publications

The Croatian psycholinguistic database: Estimates for 6000 nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs

The Croatian psycholinguistic database: Estimates for 6000 nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs

Cognitive performance and specific aspects of language processing are associated with Oldowan-like chert flaking and retouch

Stem overgeneralizations in the acquisition of Croatian verbal morphology: Evidence from parental questionnaires

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