SPAML: Semantic Priming Across Many Languages

Semantic priming has been studied for nearly 50 years across various experimental manipulations and theoretical frameworks. These studies provide evidence of cognitive underpinnings of the structure and organization of semantic representation in both healthy and clinical populations. In this registered report, we propose to create a large database of semantic priming values, alleviating the sample size and limited language issues with previous studies in this area. Consequently, this database will include semantic priming data across multiple languages using an adaptive sampling procedure. This study will test the size of semantic priming effect and its variability across languages. Results will support semantic priming when reduced response latencies are found for related word-pair conditions in comparison to unrelated word-pair conditions. Differences in semantic priming across languages will be supported when priming effect confidence intervals do not overlap.

Do You Have a "Strict Purse"? The Routes to Meaning in Metaphor

<p>Theoretically there are two processing systems through which meaning can be found for a given statement: an effortless, associative processing system (meaning retrieval), or an effortful, analytical processing system (meaning construction). The current study investigated whether or not the context in which target (loosely figurative) word-pairs are presented can influence whether a person relies on associative or analytical processing to find their meaning. Participants were presented with target (loosely figurative) novel word-pairs and asked to judge them for meaningfulness. These target novel word-pairs were presented in different contexts: either mixed with clearly meaningful word-pairs or with additional novel word-pairs. By nature, meaning cannot be retrieved for novel word-pairs, so if a novel word-pair is to be found "meaningful," then its meaning must usually be constructed online (via the analytical processing system). Consistent with increased reliance on analytical processing, participants who saw target novel word-pairs mixed with additional novel word-pairs judged them meaningful more often than did participants who saw them mixed with clearly meaningful word-pairs. Participants who saw target novel word-pairs mixed with additional novel word-pairs also had more negative N400s to target novel word-pairs, indicating that they committed more semantic effort to the processing of these (again consistent with analytical processing). Associative processing does not involve attempts to construct new meaning for given word-pairs. Consistent with increased reliance on associative processing, participants who saw target novel word-pairs mixed with clearly meaningful word-pairs judged them meaningful less often than did participants who saw them mixed with additional novel word-pairs. These participants also had less negative N400s to target novel word-pairs, indicating that they committed less semantic effort to the processing of these (again fitting with associative processing). Further evidence for different contexts leading to differential processing of the same target novel word-pairs was provided by examination of wave morphology. Two distinctive patterns of neural activation were found in response to the same target novel word-pairs, differing depending on the context in which these appeared. Overall, the results of the current study were consistent with the hypothesis that context can influence which processing system is relied upon to find meaning for a given statement. This finding challenges contemporary models of meaning construction and metaphor comprehension by showing that context is essential to these processes and needs to be taken into consideration.</p>

Do You Have a "Strict Purse"? The Routes to Meaning in Metaphor

<p>Theoretically there are two processing systems through which meaning can be found for a given statement: an effortless, associative processing system (meaning retrieval), or an effortful, analytical processing system (meaning construction). The current study investigated whether or not the context in which target (loosely figurative) word-pairs are presented can influence whether a person relies on associative or analytical processing to find their meaning. Participants were presented with target (loosely figurative) novel word-pairs and asked to judge them for meaningfulness. These target novel word-pairs were presented in different contexts: either mixed with clearly meaningful word-pairs or with additional novel word-pairs. By nature, meaning cannot be retrieved for novel word-pairs, so if a novel word-pair is to be found "meaningful," then its meaning must usually be constructed online (via the analytical processing system). Consistent with increased reliance on analytical processing, participants who saw target novel word-pairs mixed with additional novel word-pairs judged them meaningful more often than did participants who saw them mixed with clearly meaningful word-pairs. Participants who saw target novel word-pairs mixed with additional novel word-pairs also had more negative N400s to target novel word-pairs, indicating that they committed more semantic effort to the processing of these (again consistent with analytical processing). Associative processing does not involve attempts to construct new meaning for given word-pairs. Consistent with increased reliance on associative processing, participants who saw target novel word-pairs mixed with clearly meaningful word-pairs judged them meaningful less often than did participants who saw them mixed with additional novel word-pairs. These participants also had less negative N400s to target novel word-pairs, indicating that they committed less semantic effort to the processing of these (again fitting with associative processing). Further evidence for different contexts leading to differential processing of the same target novel word-pairs was provided by examination of wave morphology. Two distinctive patterns of neural activation were found in response to the same target novel word-pairs, differing depending on the context in which these appeared. Overall, the results of the current study were consistent with the hypothesis that context can influence which processing system is relied upon to find meaning for a given statement. This finding challenges contemporary models of meaning construction and metaphor comprehension by showing that context is essential to these processes and needs to be taken into consideration.</p>

Nymph Piss and Gravy Orgies: Local and Global Contrast Effects in Relational Humor

How does the relation between two words create humor? In this paper, we investigated the effect of global and local contrast on the humor of word pairs. We capitalized on the existence of psycholinguistic lexical norms by examining violations of expectations set up by typical patterns of English usage (global contrast) and within the local context of the words within the word pairs (local contrast). Global contrast was operationalized as lexical-semantic norms for single-words and local contrast was operationalized as the orthographic, phonological, and semantic distance between the two words in the pair. Through crowdsourced (Study 1) and best-worst (Study 2) ratings of the humor of a large set of word pairs (i.e., compounds), we find evidence of both global and local contrast on compound-word humor. Specifically, we find that humor arises when there is a violation of expectations at the local level, between the individual words that make up the word pair, even after accounting for violations at the global level relative to the entire language. Semantic variables (arousal, dominance, concreteness) were stronger predictors of word pair humor whereas form-related variables (number of letters, phonemes, letter frequency) were stronger predictors of single-word humor. Moreover, we also find evidence for the specific ways in which semantic dissimilarity can increase humor, by using local contrast to defuse the impact of low-valence words by making them seem amusing, or to enhance the incongruence of highly imageable pairs of concrete words.

MKPM: Multi keyword-pair matching for natural language sentences

Sentence matching is widely used in various natural language tasks, such as natural language inference, paraphrase identification and question answering. For these tasks, we need to understand the logical and semantic relationship between two sentences. Most current methods use all information within a sentence to build a model and hence determine its relationship to another sentence. However, the information contained in some sentences may cause redundancy or introduce noise, impeding the performance of the model. Therefore, we propose a sentence matching method based on multi keyword-pair matching (MKPM), which uses keyword pairs in two sentences to represent the semantic relationship between them, avoiding the interference of redundancy and noise. Specifically, we first propose a sentence-pair-based attention mechanism sp-attention to select the most important word pair from the two sentences as a keyword pair, and then propose a Bi-task architecture to model the semantic information of these keyword pairs. The Bi-task architecture is as follows: 1. In order to understand the semantic relationship at the word level between two sentences, we design a word-pair task (WP-Task), which uses these keyword pairs to complete sentence matching independently. 2. We design a sentence-pair task (SP-Task) to understand the sentence level semantic relationship between the two sentences by sentence denoising. Through the integration of the two tasks, our model can understand sentences more accurately from the two granularities of word and sentence. Experimental results show that our model can achieve state-of-the-art performance in several tasks. Our source code is publicly available1.

Stabreimende Wortpaare in Deutsche Versnovellistik des 13. bis 15. Jahrhunderts

The recently published compendium of 175 German verse tales from the 13th–15th century (Deutsche Versnovellistik des 13. bis 15. Jahrhunderts) includes never-before-published material in critical edition, so that a survey of the alliterating word-pairs within this arguably hard to define genre seems desirable. Some 380 pairs are collected and analysed within the context of each tale, with special attention paid to earlier transmission of the pairs or their innovative nature, respectively. Following a methodology that has been employed to cover all of Old and Early Middle High German and much of classical High German, the history of this durable rhetorical device is extended well into the late medieval era. Further surveys will help to fill in remaining gaps in coverage of the history of the alliterating word-pair in German.

Asymmetric Influence of Vocalic Context on Mandarin Sibilants: Evidence From ERP Studies

In the present study, we examine the interactive effect of vowels on Mandarin fricative sibilants using a passive oddball paradigm to determine whether the HEIGHT features of vowels can spread on the surface and influence preceding consonants with unspecified features. The stimuli are two pairs of Mandarin words ([sa] ∼ [ʂa] and [su] ∼ [ʂu]) contrasting in vowel HEIGHT ([LOW] vs. [HIGH]). Each word in the same pair was presented both as standard and deviant, resulting in four conditions (/standard/[deviant]: /sa/[ʂa] ∼ /ʂa/[sa] and /su/[ʂu] ∼ /ʂu/[su]). In line with the Featurally Underspecified Lexicon (FUL) model, asymmetric patterns of processing were found in the [su] ∼ [ʂu] word pair where both the MMN (mismatch negativity) and LDN (late discriminative negativity) components were more negative in /su/[ʂu] (mismatch) than in /ʂu/[su] (no mismatch), suggesting the spreading of the feature [HIGH] from the vowel [u] to [ʂ] on the surface. In the [sa] ∼ [ʂa] pair, however, symmetric negativities (for both MMN and LDN) were observed as there is no conflict between the surface feature [LOW] from [a] to [ʂ] and the underlying specified feature [LOW] of [s]. These results confirm that not all features are fully specified in the mental lexicon: features of vowels can spread on the surface and influence surrounding unspecified segments.