Eliciting semantic properties: methods and applications
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EDITORIAL
Eliciting semantic properties: methods and applications Sergio E. Chaigneau1 · Enrique Canessa1,2 · Alessandro Lenci3 · Barry Devereux4 Received: 1 October 2020 / Accepted: 5 October 2020 © Marta Olivetti Belardinelli and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Asking subjects to list semantic properties for concepts is essential for predicting performance in several linguistic and nonlinguistic tasks and for creating carefully controlled stimuli for experiments. The property elicitation task and the ensuing norms are widely used across the field, to investigate the organization of semantic memory and design computational models thereof. The contributions of the current Special Topic discuss several core issues concerning how semantic property norms are constructed and how they may be used for research aiming at understanding cognitive processing. The property listing task (PLT, a.k.a. Feature Listing Task) and the semantic property norms (SPNs, a.k.a. Semantic Feature Norms) derived from this task are widely used by researchers interested in cognition. Asking subjects to list semantic properties for concepts has proven very useful for creating carefully controlled stimuli for experiments and for predicting performance in many linguistic and non-linguistic tasks. The property elicitation task and the ensuing norms are widely used to investigate the organization of semantic memory and to design computational models of concept representation and access. The contributions to the current Special Topic discuss several core issues concerning how SPNs are constructed and how they may be used for research aiming at understanding cognitive processing. In doing so, the Special Topic illustrates the breadth of applications of SPNs and contributes to standardizing procedures that could in the future enable better large-scale studies (i.e., interlaboratory, inter-language, and inter-cultural comparisons),
* Sergio E. Chaigneau [email protected] 1
Center of Cognitive Research (CINCO), Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Avda. Presidente Errázuriz, 3328 Las Condes, Santiago, Chile
2
Faculty of Engineering and Sciences, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Viña del Mar, Chile
3
Dipartimento Di Filologia, Letteratura E Linguistica, Università Di Pisa, Pisa, Italy
4
School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queens University Belfast, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
thus expanding and developing the use of norming studies in cognition and related fields. In general, researchers using the PLT wish to characterize conceptual content coming from semantic memory (Canessa and Chaigneau 2020; Chaigneau et al. 2018). In a PLT, participants are asked to list properties that are typically true of a given concept. After the PLT is used to extract semantic properties for individual concepts, SPNs can then be constructed from the elicited features to characterize the representation and content of a semantic space. SPNs are generally represented as matrices containing differen
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