Social Semantics: An exploration of the meaning underpinning social words

ESRC DTP：Veronica Diveica：ES/P00069X/1您错了，达西先生，如果您认为您的声明方式对我有任何其他方面的影响，除了它免除了我在拒绝您时可能会感到的担忧，如果您表现得更有绅士风度的话。-简·奥斯汀，《傲慢与偏见》上面的散文，关于个人品格、正直和道德的重要性的经典故事，几乎全部使用了涉及社会行为的词语。在讲故事中，像礼貌和绅士这样的社交词汇有助于带来一种人性化的感觉，并将读者或听众带到另一个人的角度。事实上，我们在日常生活中经常遇到社交词汇，它们几乎占到了我们词汇的一半。它们在我们的语言和我们的经验中无处不在，反映了它们对于成功地在社交世界中导航的重要性。尽管这一点得到了公认的重要性，但心理学研究直到最近才开始探索社交词汇在语言中是否具有特殊的地位。尽管语言对我们的精神和社会生活非常重要，但对于语言的关键方面，我们还没有一个完整的认知或神经解释。在这项拟议的研究中，我们将重点放在这样一个方面：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的关键组成部分。然而，之前的大部分研究都集中在对具体名词的加工上，比如椅子和狗，而对信任和荣誉等抽象的社交词汇的加工则知之甚少。因此，关于“社交语言”有很多悬而未决的问题，包括基本的问题，比如到底是什么定义了一个词是“社交”的，什么属性使社交词不同于其他人，以及社交词是如何由大脑代表的。为了开始回答这些问题，我们将要求参与者阅读一组单词，并从不同的维度对它们进行评级，包括每个单词描述一种社会行为、一种社会制度或社会环境的其他相关方面的程度。这将使我们理解“社会性”的概念，以及如何在一个潜在的“社会性”连续体上使用范围广泛的词汇。我们将与其他与词义相关的重要维度一起考察这一点，例如一个词在脑海中召唤图像的程度，以及它可以在多大程度上根据上下文具有多种含义或意义。然后，我们将调查一个词相对于其他维度的“社会性”如何影响人们处理它的速度和表现，以及随后对它的含义做出决定的速度和效果。这将有助于我们建立一个关于词义如何表征的更完整的理论，以及更广泛的关于社交大脑的理论，这将对理解语言发展以及有语言障碍和其他社交困难的人所面临的挑战(例如自闭症谱系障碍)具有重要意义。

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).