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- Title
Processing English compounds: Investigating semantic transparency.
- Authors
Gagné, Christina L.; Spalding, Thomas L.; Nisbet, Kelly A.
- Abstract
Semantic transparency is widely believed to affect the processing of compound words. It has been described as the degree to which the meaning of the constituent is retained in the meaning of the whole compound, but also as the degree to which the meaning of the compound is predictable from the meaning of the constituents. Furthermore, semantic transparency has been operationalized in various ways (e.g., Libben 2010; Libben et al. 2003; Sandra 1990). We describe a study in which transparency was measured based on: 1) linguistic criteria used by informed judges, 2) participant ratings of a) how predictable a compound's meaning was from its parts, and b) the extent that each constituent retains its meaning in the compound, 3) Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA; Landauer & Dumais 1997) scores for the compound and each constituent. We used these measures to test the claim that meaning retention ratings reflect the semantic similarity between a compound's meaning and the constituent meaning, whereas the predictability ratings indicate the degree of semantic compositionality of the compound's concept (see Marelli & Luzzatti 2012). We did not find support for these specific conceptualizations of semantic transparency. We then investigated the relationships among these different measures of semantic transparency to determine whether they reflect the same underlying construct, and in particular, the extent to which the LSA scores and participant ratings can predict the classification by informed judges using linguistic criteria. Finally, we used the various measures to predict typing times (a measure of processing) of compound words. The results from these various analyses indicate that the various methods of measuring semantic transparency do not reflect the same underlying aspects of semantic transparency.
- Subjects
ENGLISH compound words; SEMANTICS in the English language; ENGLISH glossaries, vocabularies, etc.; LINGUISTICS research
- Publication
SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics, 2016, Vol 13, Issue 2, p2
- ISSN
1336-782X
- Publication type
Article