California State University Bakersfield, Bakersfield, CA, USA.
Department of Psychology, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NL, A1B 3X9, Canada.
Behav Res Methods. 2021 Dec;53(6):2430-2438. doi: 10.3758/s13428-021-01570-0. Epub 2021 Apr 12.
Lists of semantically related words are better recalled on immediate memory tests than otherwise equivalent lists of unrelated words. However, measuring the degree of relatedness is not straightforward. We report three experiments that assess the ability of various measures of semantic relatedness-including latent semantic analysis (LSA), GloVe, fastText, and a number of measures based on WordNet-to predict whether two lists of words will be differentially recalled. In Experiment 1, all measures except LSA correctly predicted the observed better recall of the related than the unrelated list. In Experiment 2, all measures except JCN predicted that abstract words would be recalled equally as well as concrete words because of their enhanced semantic relatedness. In Experiment 3, LSA, GLoVe, and fastText predicted an enhanced concreteness effect because the concrete words were more related; three WordNet measures predicted a small concreteness effect because the abstract and concrete words did not differ in semantic relatedness; and three other WordNet measures predicted no concreteness effect because the abstract words were more related than the concrete words. A small concreteness effect was observed. Over the three experiments, only two measures, both based on simple WordNet path length, predicted all three results. We suggest that the results are not unexpected because semantic processing in episodic memory experiments differs from that in reading, similarity judgment, and analogy tasks which are the most common way of assessing such measures.
在即时记忆测试中，语义相关词的列表比其他等效的不相关词的列表更容易被回忆起来。然而，衡量相关性的程度并不简单。我们报告了三项实验，评估了各种语义相关性衡量标准的能力，包括潜在语义分析（LSA）、GloVe、fastText 以及基于 WordNet 的许多衡量标准，以预测两个词列表是否会有不同的回忆。在实验 1 中，除了 LSA 之外，所有衡量标准都正确地预测了相关列表的回忆效果要好于不相关列表的观察结果。在实验 2 中，除了 JCN 之外，所有衡量标准都预测抽象词的回忆效果与具体词一样好，因为它们的语义相关性增强了。在实验 3 中，LSA、GloVe 和 fastText 预测了增强的具体性效应，因为具体词更相关；三个基于 WordNet 的衡量标准预测了较小的具体性效应，因为抽象词和具体词在语义相关性上没有差异；而另外三个基于 WordNet 的衡量标准则预测了没有具体性效应，因为抽象词比具体词更相关。观察到一个较小的具体性效应。在这三个实验中，只有两种衡量标准，都基于简单的 WordNet 路径长度，预测了所有三个结果。我们认为，结果并不出人意料，因为在情景记忆实验中的语义处理与阅读、相似性判断和类比任务不同，这些是评估此类衡量标准的最常见方法。
