Semantic transparency is not invisibility: A computational model of perceptually-grounded conceptual combination in word processing

Günther, Fritz; Petilli, Marco Alessandro; Marelli, Marco

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2020.104104

Cited by 21 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 126 publications

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“…head salad—lettuce) and the holistic compound lemma. Of course, it is possible that more opaque modifiers (and heads, for that matter) are (also) coactivated based on some other information not included in our semantic transparency rating (such as visually/perceptually grounded effects; e.g., Günther et al, 2020). However, it is likely that the failure to observe an effect of modifier transparency on the interference effect is due to the lack of statistical power, which would be even more apparent when looking at modifier-related than head-related effects.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the lexical representation(s) of compounds: A continuous picture naming study.

Döring¹,

Rahman²,

Zwitserlood³

et al. 2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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The lexical representation of compound words in speech production is still under debate. While most studies with healthy adult speakers suggest that a single lemma representation is active during compound production, data from neuropsychological studies point toward multiple representations, with activation of the compound’s constituent lemmas in addition to the compound’s lemma. This study exploits the cumulative semantic interference effect to investigate the lexical representation of compounds in speech production. In a continuous picture naming experiment, category membership was established through the compounds’ first constituents (category animals: zebra crossing, pony tail, cat litter …), while the compounds themselves were not semantically related. Moreover, pictures depicting the compounds’ first constituents (zebra, pony, cat …) were presented as a control condition. As expected, naming latencies within categories increased linearly with each additionally named category member when producing monomorphemic words, which is interpreted as increasing interference during lexical selection. Importantly, this cumulative semantic interference effect was also observed for compounds. This indicates that the lemmas of the compounds’ first constituents were activated during compound production, causing interference due to their semantic relationship and thereby hampering the production of the whole compound. The results are thus in line with the multiple-lemma representation account (Marelli et al., 2012). We argue that the apparent contradiction between results of previous studies with healthy adult speakers and our current study can be explained by the different experimental paradigms used.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the lexical representation(s) of compounds: A continuous picture naming study.

Döring¹,

Rahman²,

Zwitserlood³

et al. 2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Following previous literature (e.g., Lazaridou et al, 2017), we extracted, for each image, the 4096dimensional vector representation in the second-to-last layer (fc7), which is believed to capture complex, abstract, gestalt-level representations of objects (LeCun, Bengio, & Hinton, 2015;Smith, Pezzelle, Franzon, Zanini, & Bernardi, 2017;Zeiler & Fergus, 2014). For each word stimulus, a unique vision-based representation was then estimated as its prototypical visual activation, operationalized as the average vector for all pictures extracted for the given word (see Günther, Petilli, & Marelli, 2020;Lazaridou et al, 2017). Items that deviated too far (in terms of cosine similarity) from the mean activation value within a category (interquartile ranges over 1.5) were not included in the averaging process.…”

Section: Image-based Estimates Of Visual Similaritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Data-driven computational models reveal perceptual simulation in word processing

Petilli¹,

Günther²,

Vergallito³

et al. 2019

Preprint

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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.

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“…Obtaining such insights are expected to benefit creativity education by facilitating and training students to be more creative. Methodological variations including computational neuroscientific methods will also be of interest in future work to determine the specific algorithmic process and differences between the two combinatorial types (Costello and Keane, 1997;Lynott and Ramscar, 2001;Perlovsky and Levine, 2012;Khalil et al, 2019;Günther et al, 2020).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Asymmetric Underlying Mechanisms of Relation-Based and Property-Based Noun–Noun Conceptual Combination

Choi

Yoon

2021

Front. Psychol.

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Conceptual combination is a fundamental human cognitive ability by which people can experience infinite thinking by artfully combining finite knowledge. For example, one can instantly combine “cactus” and “fish” together as “prickly fish” even if one has never previously heard of a “cactus fish.” Although two major combinatorial types—property and relational combinations—have been identified, the underlying processes of each remain elusive. This study investigates the asymmetric processing mechanisms underlying property and relational combinations by examining differential semantic activation during noun–noun conceptual combination. Across two experiments utilizing each combinatorial process as semantic priming and implementing a lexical decision task immediately after combination, we measure and compare the semantic activation patterns of intrinsic and extrinsic semantic features in these two combinatorial types. We found converging evidence that property and relational combinations involve asymmetric semantic information and entail distinct processing mechanisms. In property combination, the intrinsic feature in the modifier concept showed greater activation than the semantic feature of the same dimension in the head concept. In contrast, in relational combination, the extrinsic semantic feature in the head concept and the whole modifier concept showed similar levels of activation. Moreover, our findings also showed that these patterns of semantic activation occurred only when the combinatorial process was complete, indicating that accessing the same lexical-semantic information is not sufficient to observe asymmetric patterns. These findings demonstrate that property combination involves replacing a specific semantic feature of the head noun with that of the modifier noun, whereas relational combination involves completing the semantic feature of the head noun with the whole modifier concept. We discuss the implications of these findings, research limitations, and future research directions.

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Semantic transparency is not invisibility: A computational model of perceptually-grounded conceptual combination in word processing

Cited by 21 publications

References 126 publications

On the lexical representation(s) of compounds: A continuous picture naming study.

On the lexical representation(s) of compounds: A continuous picture naming study.

Data-driven computational models reveal perceptual simulation in word processing

Asymmetric Underlying Mechanisms of Relation-Based and Property-Based Noun–Noun Conceptual Combination

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