Semantic similarity: normative ratings for 185 Spanish noun triplets

Abstract

The present study introduces the first Spanish database with normative ratings of semantic similarity for 185 word triplets. Each word triplet is constituted by a target word (e.g., guisante [pea]) and two semantically related and nonassociatively related words: a word highly related in meaning to the target (e.g., judía [bean]), and a word less related in meaning to the target (e.g., patata [potato]). The degree of meaning similarity was assessed by 332 participants by using a semantic similarity rating task on a 9-point scale. Pairs having a value of semantic similarity ranging from 5 to 9 were classified as being more semantically related, whereas those with values ranging from 2 to 4.99 were considered as being less semantically related. The relative distance between the two pairs for the same target ranged from 0.48 to 5.07 points. Mean comparisons revealed that participants rated the more similar words as being significantly more similar in meaning to the target word than were the less similar words. In addition to the semantic similarity norms, values of concreteness and familiarity of each word in a triplet are provided. The present database can be a very useful tool for scientists interested in designing experiments to examine the role of semantics in language processing. Since the variable of semantic similarity includes a wide range of values, it can be used as either a continuous or a dichotomous variable. The full database is available in the supplementary materials.

Explorando el núcleo del significado de los conceptos. Incidencia de las variables psicolingüísticas en una tarea de reconocimiento

“…En los últimos 15 años los resultados de esta actividad se han compilado en Normas de Producción de Atributos Semánticos para diferentes lenguas (Buchanan et al, 2012;Buchanan et al, 2019;De Deyne et al, 2008;Deng et al, 2021;Devereux et al, 2014;Lenci et al, 2013;McRae et al, 2005;Moldovan et al, 2015;Montefinese et al, 2014;Ruts et al, 2004;Stein y de Azevedo Gomes, 2009;Vinson y Vigliocco, 2008;Vivas, Vivas, Comesaña, et al, 2017). Se considera que las Normas reflejan la estructura estadística de las categorías en estudio y dan cuenta de los aspectos de significado que son compartidos por una comunidad lingüística, dado que contienen distribuciones de frecuencia de atributos y otros datos estadísticos respecto a los conceptos.…”

Verb similarity: Comparing corpus and psycholinguistic data

“…However, since most of these collections are limited to pairs of nouns, with the exception of Hill et al (2015), Yang and Powers (2006) and Baker et al (2014), the coverage of verbs (and other categories) is reduced. For Spanish there is a general scarcity of these resources: there are only ratings for nouns, either collected from native speakers (Moldovan 2015), or translated from English (Finkelstein et al 2001;Camacho-Collados et al 2015).…”

I saw this somewhere else: The Spanish Ambiguous Words (SAW) database

“…On the other hand, in studies where participants are given the opportunity to provide all the meanings they know, their responses often show some degree of semantic overlap (i.e., relatedness), perhaps reflecting an overlap of semantic representations in the lexicon. Thus, relatedness is a crucial variable for research on semantic organization and processing (Azuma, 1996;Moldovan et al, 2014), although it is difficult to group or indeed to separate meanings based on the responses provided by different individuals. For this reason, having collected subjective meanings, researchers frequently use a dictionary to determine whether or not different meanings fall in the same meaning categories.…”