AN ANALYSIS OF THE METHOD OF TRIADS IN RESEARCH ON THE MEASUREMENT OF MEANING.

Abstract

As part of an attempt to develop quantitative measures of meaning that differ from the measures of affective meaning that are already available, the present study focused on the relationships between indices of meaning similarity ob tained from the semantic differential, the method of associative overlap and the method of triads. Concepts having similar semantic differential profiles were selected, and meaning similarity indices by the above mentioned three methods were compared. It was found that the associative overlap indices were highly correlated with the judgments of meaning similarity obtained by the method of triads. The affective coding of words was also related to the triadic judgments, but this effect was slight. It is concluded that S's judgments of meaning similarity are causally dependent on associative connections between words rather than a knowledge of formal semantic relationship between words, such as synonymy or mutual substitutability. The method of associative overlap appears to provide a promising procedure for the measurement of meaning similarity. (Author)

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 1964
Accession Number
AD0603944

Entities

People

  • Charles E. Osgood
  • Harry C. Triandis
  • Kenneth I. Forster

Organizations

  • University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Cognition
  • Judgment
  • Measurement
  • Mental Processes

Fields of Study

  • Psychology

Readers

  • Brain and Cognitive Science; Experimental Psychology; Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Regression Analysis.