The effects of psycholinguistic variables on the behavior of associative processes

746

Abstract

The psycholinguistic variables — word frequency, age of acquisition and etc. — affect the human’s processing of information. In this paper, we explore the effects of the four psycholinguistic variables — word frequency, age of acquisition, word familiarity and imageability — on the associative processes, that is, on the probability that words will appear as the associations for verbal stimuli; this probability isestimated by association abundance (the amount of different stimulus words which elicit these associations in the associative dictionary). The study is done using 286 words for which ones there are normative data for all variables. The main goal of this study is to find out the independent effects of each abovementioned psycholinguistic variables on association abundance. This is done by determining whether the including of one of the psycholinguistic variables as an additional predictor in the regression equation where the criterion is association abundance and the predictors — some other psycholinguistic variables leads to the significant increasing of the efficiency of the prediction. The received results show the independent effects of word frequency and age of acquisition on association abundance (the increasing of the efficiency of the prediction is significant, p<0.001 in both cases). These effects for word familiarity and word imageabilityhaven’t been detected.

General Information

Keywords: age of acquisition, word frequency, word familiarity, word imageability, association abundance

Journal rubric: Psycholinguistics

Article type: scientific article

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17759/exppsy.2019120109

For citation: Vorontsov K.A., Grigoriev A.A. The effects of psycholinguistic variables on the behavior of associative processes. Eksperimental'naâ psihologiâ = Experimental Psychology (Russia), 2019. Vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 119–125. DOI: 10.17759/exppsy.2019120109. (In Russ., аbstr. in Engl.)

References

  1. Gol’din V.E. Russian associative dictionary: associative reactions of school boys I—XI grades: in 2 v. V. II. From reaction to stimulus. P. 1. A—N / V.E. Gol’din, A.P. Sdobnova, A.O. Mart’yanov. Saratov: Izd-vo Sarat. un-ty, 2011. 480 p.
  2. Kolbeneva M.G., Aleksandrov U.I. The Emotions and Adjective of the Russian language. 1. The Adjectives which characterize eyesight, acusis, taste and olfaction // Experimental psychology. 2011. Volume 4. № 1. P. 17—27.
  3. Medyntsev A.A. The Influence of the Implicit Prompt on the Automatic Data Reduction Processes Within the Anagram Task // Experimental Psychology. 2017. Volume 10. № 1. P. 23—37. doi:10.17759/ exppsy.2017100103.
  4. Brown, G.D.A., & Watson, F.L. First in, first out: Word learning age and spoken word frequency as predictors of word familiarity and word naming latency. Memory and Cognition. 1987. Т. 15 (3). С. 208— 216.
  5. Elbers L.H., and WA van Loon-Vervoorn. “Taal als resultaat van actief leren.” Logopedie en Foniatrie. 1990. Т. 69. С. 19—23.
  6. Ellis A.W., & Morrison C.M. Real age-of-acquisition effects in lexical retrieval. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition. 1998. Т. 24 (2). С. 515—523.
  7. Grigoriev A., Oshepkov I. Objective age of acquisition norms for a set of 286 words in Russian: relationships with other psycholinguistic variables. Behaviour Research Methods. 2013. Т. 45 (4). С. 1208—1217.
  8. Holmes S.J., & Ellis A.W. Age of acquisition and typically effects in picture naming, object decision and category verification. Visual Cognition. 2006. Т. 13 (7—8). С. 884—911.
  9. Johnston R.A., & Barry C. Age of acquisition effects in the semantic processing of pictures. Memory and Cognition. 2005. Т. 33 (5). С. 905—912.
  10. Loon-Vervoorn, WA van. Imageability and age of acquisition as determinants of word selection in word association // Imagery and cognition: Proceedings of the Second European Workshop on Imagery and Cognition / C. Cornoldi (Ed.). University of Padua, Italy. 1988. С. 101—110.
  11. Monaghan, J., & Ellis A.W. Age of acquisition and the completeness of phonological representations. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 2002. Т. 15 (7—8). С. 759—788.
  12. Moore V., Smith-Spark J.H., & Valentine T. The effects of age of acquisition on object recognition. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology. 2004. Т. 16 (3). С. 417—439.
  13. Morrison C.M., & Ellis A.W. Roles of word frequency and age of acquisition in word naming and lexical decision. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 1995. Т. 21 (1). С. 116— 133.
  14. Morrison C.M., & Ellis A.W. Real age of acquisition effects in word naming and lexical decision. British Journal of Psychology. 2000. Т. 91. С. 167—180.
  15. Morrison C.M., Hirsh K.W., Chappell T., & Ellis A.W. Age and age of acquisition: An evaluation of the cumulative frequency hypothesis. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology. 2002. Т. 14 (4). С. 435—459.
  16. Preston K.A. (1935). “The speed of word perception and its relation to reading ability.” The Journalof General Psychology, 13, 199—203.
  17. Thorndike E.L. (1931). A teacher’s word book of 20,000 words. NewYork: Teacher’s College Press.
  18. Turner J. E., Valentine T., & Ellis A.W. Contrasting effects of age of acquisition and word frequency on auditory and visual lexical decision. Memory and Cognition. 1998. Т. 26 (6). С. 1282—1291.
  19. Van Loon-Vervoorn, Anita, and Miep Ham-Van Van Der Koppen. The importance of age of word acquisition for imageability in word processing // Cognitive and neuropsychological approaches to mental imagery / M. Denis, J. Engelkamp, J.T.E. Richardson (Eds.). Springer Netherlands. 1988. С. 99—107.
  20. Van Loon-Vervoorn W.A. Eigenschappen van basiswoorden [Characteristics of base-words]. Lisse, The Netherlands: Swets and Zeitlinger. 1989.

Information About the Authors

Kirill A. Vorontsov, Postgraduate, Institute of Linguistics of Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia, e-mail: kavorontsov@yandex.ru

Andrei A. Grigoriev, Doctor of Philology, Chief Researcher of the Laboratory of Psychology and Psychophysiology of Creative Activity, Institute of Psychology of Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia, ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6186-2320, e-mail: andrey4002775@yandex.ru

Metrics

Views

Total: 2130
Previous month: 16
Current month: 3

Downloads

Total: 746
Previous month: 2
Current month: 0