Social Semantics: An exploration of the meaning underpinning social words

社会语义学：对社会词语意义的探索

• 批准号: NE/T014180/1
• 负责人: Richard Binney
• 金额: $ 1.27万
• 依托单位: Bangor University
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2020 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=NE%2FT014180%2F1
• 关键词: Social; Semantics; exploration; meaning; underpinning

ESRC DTP : Veronica Diveica : ES/P00069X/1"You are mistaken, Mr Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner." - Jane Austen, Pride and PrejudiceThe above prose of Pride and Prejudice, a classic tale in the importance of personal character, integrity, and morality, almost exclusively uses words that refer to social behaviours. In storytelling, social words like manner and gentleman help bring forth a sense of humanness, and transport the reader or listener into the perspective of another. Indeed, we encounter social words frequently in our daily lives and they represent almost half of our vocabulary. Their ubiquity in our language and our experience reflects their importance for successfully navigating the social world. Despite this acknowledged importance, psychological research has only recently begun to explore whether social words have a special status in language. Despite the great importance of language to our mental and social lives, we do not yet have a complete cognitive or neural explanation for key aspects of it. In the proposed research, we focus on one such aspect: how we are able to bring to mind the meaning of words. Word meaning retrieval is a key component process in reading, listening, and other skills that involve language understanding. However, much of the previous research has focused upon the processing of concrete nouns, like chair and dog, and much less is known about abstract social words like trust and honour. Therefore, there are major outstanding questions about 'social language', including fundamental question like what it is exactly that defines a word as being 'social', what properties make social words different to others, and how social words are represented by the brain.To begin to answer these questions, we will ask participants to read a set of words and rate them on various dimensions, including the degree to which each word describes a social behaviour, a social institution, or other relevant aspect of the social environment. This will allow us to understand the concept of 'socialness' and how a wide range of words sit on a potential 'socialness' continuum. We will examine this alongside other important dimensions related to word meaning such as such as the degree to which a word conjures an image in the mind's eye, and the degree to which it can have multiple meanings or senses depending on the context. Then we will investigate how the 'socialness' of a word, relative to other dimensions, can influence how fast and how well people process and make subsequent decisions about its meaning. This will help us to build a more complete theory about how word meaning is represented, and about the social brain more generally, which will have implications for the understanding of both language development and the challenges faced by those with language impairments and other social interaction difficulties (e.g., Autism Spectrum Disorder).

ESRC DTP：Veronica Diveica：“达西先生，如果你以为你这样表白，除了使我不必担心拒绝你之外，还有别的什么影响，那你就错了。- 简·奥斯汀，《傲慢与偏见》上面的散文《傲慢与偏见》是一个关于个人性格、正直和道德重要性的经典故事，几乎完全使用了指社会行为的词汇。在讲故事的过程中，像礼貌和绅士这样的社交词汇有助于产生一种人性感，并将读者或听众带入另一个人的视角。事实上，我们在日常生活中经常遇到社交词汇，它们几乎占我们词汇量的一半。它们在我们的语言和经验中无处不在，反映了它们对于成功驾驭社会世界的重要性。尽管社会词汇的重要性得到了承认，但心理学研究直到最近才开始探索社会词汇在语言中是否有特殊的地位。尽管语言对我们的精神和社会生活非常重要，但我们还没有对它的关键方面进行完整的认知或神经解释。在拟议的研究中，我们专注于这样一个方面：我们如何能够记住单词的含义。词义提取是阅读、听力和其他涉及语言理解的技能中的一个关键组成部分。然而，以前的研究大多集中在具体名词的加工上，比如椅子和狗，而对抽象的社会词，比如信任和荣誉，了解得很少。因此，关于“社交语言”，还有一些重大的悬而未决的问题，包括一些基本问题，比如到底是什么定义了一个词是“社交”的，是什么属性使社交词与其他词不同，以及大脑如何表征社交词。为了开始回答这些问题，我们将要求参与者阅读一组单词，并从各个方面对它们进行评分，包括每个词描述社会行为、社会制度或社会环境的其他相关方面的程度。这将使我们能够理解“社会性”的概念，以及各种各样的词如何坐在一个潜在的“社会性”连续体上。我们将研究这一点以及与词义相关的其他重要维度，例如一个词在脑海中唤起图像的程度，以及它根据上下文可以具有多种含义或意义的程度。然后，我们将研究一个词的“社会性”，相对于其他维度，如何影响人们处理和随后决定其含义的速度和程度。这将有助于我们建立一个更完整的理论，关于词义是如何被表示的，以及更普遍的社会大脑，这将对理解语言发展以及语言障碍和其他社会互动困难（例如，自闭症谱系障碍）。