Antonym canonicity: temporal and contextual manipulations

Sharing Perceptual Experiences through Language

The aim of this article is to shed light on how sensory perceptions are communicated through authentic language. What are the language resources available to match multimodal perceptions, and how do we use them in real communication? We discuss insights from previous work on the topic of the interaction of perception, cognition, and language and explain how language users recontextualise perception in communication about sensory experiences. Within the framework of cognitive semantics, we show that the complexities of multimodal perception are clearly reflected in the multifunctional use of words to convey meanings and feelings. To showcase the language resources employed, we base our findings on research on how architects convey their perceptions of built space. Two main patterns emerge: they use multimodal expressions (soft, bland, and jarring) and descriptions of built space through motion (the building reaches out, or routes and directions such as destination, promenade, route, or landscape in combination with verbs such as start and lead) in which case the architect may either be the observer or the emerged actor. The important take-home message is that there is no neat and clear a priori link between words and meanings, but rather "unforeseen" patterns surface in natural production data describing sensory perceptions.

The Primacy of Beauty in Music, Visual Arts and Literature: Not Just a Replication Study in the Greek Language Exploring the Effects of Verbal Fluency, Age and Gender

Research on aesthetic descriptors of art in different languages is scarce. The aim of the present study was to elucidate the conceptual structure of aesthetic experiences of three forms of art (music, visual arts and literature) in the Greek language, which has not been explored so far. It was further aimed to study if biological and cognitive factors such as age and gender might produce differences in art appreciation. A total of 467 younger and older individuals from Greece were asked to generate verbal descriptors (adjectives) in free word-listing conditions in order to collect terms reflecting the aesthetics-related semantic field of art. The capacity of verbal memory was controlled by using a battery of neuropsychological tests. Analysis of generated adjectives’ frequency and salience revealed that ‘beautiful’ was the most prominent descriptor that was selected with a distinctive primacy for all three forms of arts. The primacy of ‘beautiful’ was significantly more pronounced for visual arts relative to music and literature. Although the aging-related decline of verbal capacity was similar for males and females, the primacy of ‘beautiful’ depended on age and gender by being more emphasized for young females than males, and for old males than females. Analysis of secondary descriptors and pairs of adjectives revealed that affective and hedonic experiences are essentially fixed in the semantic field of art reflection. It is concluded that although the concept of the aesthetics seems to be diversified and rich, a clear primacy of beauty is found for the Greek cultural environment and across different forms of art. The results also highlight the presence of complex influences of biological and cognitive factors on aesthetic art experiences.

Identification of opposites and intermediates by eye and by hand

In this eye-tracking and drawing study, we investigate the perceptual grounding of different types of spatial dimensions such as dense-sparse and top-bottom, focusing both on the participants' experiences of the opposite regions, e.g., O1: dense; O2: sparse, and the region that is experienced as intermediate, e.g., INT: neither dense nor sparse. Six spatial dimensions expected to have three different perceptual structures in terms of the point and range nature of O1, INT and O2 were analysed. Presented with images, the participants were instructed to identify each region (O1, INT, O2), first by looking at the region, and then circumscribing it using the computer mouse. We measured the eye movements, identification times and various characteristics of the drawings such as the relative size of the three regions, overlaps and gaps. Three main results emerged. Firstly, generally speaking, intermediate regions were not different from the poles on any of the indicators: overall identification times, number of fixations, and locations. Some differences emerged with regard to the duration of fixations for point INTs and the number of fixations for range INTs between two range poles (O1, O2). Secondly, the analyses of the fixation locations showed that the poles support the identification of the intermediate region as much as the intermediate region supports the identification of the poles. Finally, the relative size of the three areas selected in the drawing task were consistent with the classification of the regions as points or ranges. The analyses of the gaps and the overlaps between the three areas showed that the intermediate is neither O1 nor O2, but an entity in its own right.

Is black always the opposite of white? An investigation on the comprehension of antonyms in people with schizophrenia and in healthy participants

The present investigation sought to expand our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying the recognition of antonyms and to evaluate whether these processes differed in patients with schizophrenia and in healthy controls. Antonymy is the most robust of the lexico-semantic relations and is relevant to both the mental organization of the lexicon and the organization of coherent discourse, as attested by the resurgence of interest in antonymy in the linguistic and psychological domains. In contrast, the vast literature on semantic processing in schizophrenia almost ignored antonymy. In this study, we tested the online comprehension of antonyms in 39 Italian patients with paranoid schizophrenia and in an equal number of pairwise-matched healthy controls. Participants read a definitional sentence fragment (e.g., the opposite of black is), followed by the correct antonym (white) or by a semantically unrelated word (nice), and judged whether or not the target word was correct. Patients were rather accurate in identifying antonyms, but compared to controls, they showed longer response times and higher priming scores, suggesting an exaggerated contextual facilitation. Presumably, this reflects a deficient controlled semantic processing and an overreliance on stored semantic representations.