Social Semantics: An exploration of the meaning underpinning social words

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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).