Psycholinguistic Variables in Lexical-Semantic Processing of Antonyms

master's thesis

• Author: Dora Uštulica
• Mentor: Milena Žic Fuchs (mentor)
• Mentor: Janja Čulig (mentor)
• Committee member: Milena Žic Fuchs (predsjednik povjerenstva)
• Committee member: Janja Čulig (član povjerenstva)
• Committee member: Marina Grubišić (član povjerenstva)
• Granter: University of Zagreb; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences; (Department of English language and literature); Zagreb
• Defense date and country: 2023-01-23, Croatia
• Scientific / art field, discipline and subdiscipline: HUMANISTIC SCIENCES; Philology; Anglistics

Abstract

In this study we have aimed to examine the role of psycholinguistic variables in the lexical-semantic processing of antonyms. The focus of the study was on the impact of convention on processing antonym pairs, as expressed with the psycholinguistic variable of reaction time. The aim was to further clarify antonymy, not only as a lexical, but also as a conceptual phenomenon. We used a reaction time experiment to test processing of three different categories of antonyms. Namely, those classified, upon doing a corpus analysis to determine their respective frequencies, as highly conventionalized, less highly conventionalized and unconventional. Our experiment has confirmed that there is indeed correlation between convention, as expressed by frequency, and reaction time. We take that as just another confirmation of antonymy being not only a lexical but a conceptual phenomenon too, in which both the knowledge of the language and the knowledge of the world play an important part. Finally, we have laid out some of the ways in which this lexical and conceptual phenomenon could be further studied to get more reliable results to account for the observed effects.

• Keywords: antonymy; convention; reaction time
• Language: english
• URN:NBN: urn:nbn:hr:131:777486
• Study programme: Title: English Language and Literature (double major); specializations in: Linguistics, Literature and Culture, Translation; Course: Linguistics; Study programme type: university; Study level: graduate; Academic / professional title: magistar/magistra engleskog jezika i književnosti (magistar/magistra engleskog jezika i književnosti)
• Type of resource: Text
• File origin: Born digital
• Access conditions: Open access
• Created on: 2023-01-30 10:25:34