Lexical activations in picture comparison:
A cross-linguistic approach to the relation between
language and thought in the mental lexicon

Koji Miwa, Gary Libben, Sally Rice, R. Harald Baayen
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Canada
ICCS 2008
Seoul, Korea, July 29th 20081

How Similar Are These ?

Shape ?

Colour ?

Size ?

Phonology ?

Category ?
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Research Questions
Does language influence
how similar we perceive objects to be ?
What lexical properties contributeto this perceived similarity ?

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Experiment: Picture Comparison
 Participants
20 native Japanese speakers
20 native English speakers
 Stimuli
60 pairs of two pictures with compound names in Japanese― 20 pairs shared a head constituent― 20 pairs shared a modifier constituent― 20 pairs shared no constituent

4Experiment: Picture Comparison

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Predictions

What kinds of language effects can we expect ?
 Morphological effects: Sharing constituents Semantic effects: Sharing aspects of meaning
 Frequency effects: Sharing similar frequency of use
 Form effects: Sharing similar length (in letters, phonemes, morae)

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Results: Shared Constituency
 Shared constituents allow higher ratings (especially for shared heads)
 This effect is similar for both
Japanese and English groups.
 Even though English speakers
do not know Japanese.
 In this case, the head-shared objects
denote the same basic category.
 What is at issue here is pre-linguistic
categorization.
(language ‘following’ thought)
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Results: Similarity in Meaning Intuition: Similarity in meaning might enhance perceived object similarity.
 We measure semantic similarity with LSA scores (vector space semantics).
e.g.

beetle – caterpillar (0.67)

railroad – maze (0.03)

 LSA word similarity is a strong
predictor for both Japaneseand English groups.
 Therefore, this predictor is
likely to reflect languagegeneral conceptual similarity.

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Results: Similarity in Frequency
 Intuition: Similarity in frequency affect perceived object similarity.
e.g. Similarly high in frequency:
Similarly low in frequency:

John – Peter
Bartholomew – Ebenezer

 We measure similarity infrequency using Shannon’sentropy (Shannon, 1948).
 Similarity in frequency waspredictive but only forJapanese speakers.
(language ‘feeding’ thought)
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Results: Similarity in Orthography
 Intuition: If the names of objects are written similarly, this might increase
the similarity ratings.
 If objects’ name has internal
space (e.g. apple pie),then ratings decrease forboth left and right pictures.

10Results: Similarity in Orthography
 This spacing effect was present for both Japanese and English speakers.
 Moving away from the basic category is detrimental for perceived similarity:(de Jong et al, 2002)=> language ‘following’ thought The effect is stronger for
English speakers.
=> language ‘feeding’thought.

11Result Summary
Language ‘following’ thought: large effects
1) Effects of shared constituency
reflecting cross-language categorization affordance.
2) Effects of similarity in meaning (language-general conceptual similarity.
3) Effects of spacing, reflecting basic versus non-basic category status.
Language ‘feeding’ thought: small effects
4) The greater effects of complex names with spacing in the language
using complex names (English).
5) The uniformity of two-kanji compound names in Japanese affordssimilarity effects in terms of frequency.
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Conclusion

Our result suggests that language has small effects onperceived object similarity.
( but it remains to be shown that this result generalizes
beyond the specifics of the picture comparison paradigm ).

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Thank YouCorrespondence
Koji Miwa: kmiwa@ualberta.ca
Acknowledgment
I would like to express my special thanks to members of the Centre for Comparative
Psycholinguistics (University of Alberta) for their feedbacks on the earlier version ofthis presentation and for their casual advices and insights.
The trip to ICCS2008 was partially supported by J Gordin Kaplan Graduate Student
Award from University of Alberta.
This research was supported by a Major Collaborative Research Initiative Grant(#412-2001-1009) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada toGary Libben (Director), Gonia Jarema, Eva Kehayia, Bruce Derwing, and Lori Buchanan (Coinvestigators).

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