AUTHOR=Günther Fritz , Dudschig Carolin , Kaup Barbara 

TITLE=Predicting Lexical Priming Effects from Distributional Semantic Similarities: A Replication with Extension

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=7

YEAR=2016

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01646

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01646

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<p>In two experiments, we attempted to replicate and extend findings by Günther et al. (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B33">2016</xref>) that word similarity measures obtained from distributional semantics models—Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Hyperspace Analog to Language (HAL)—predict lexical priming effects. To this end, we used the pseudo-random method to generate item material while systematically controlling for word similarities introduced by Günther et al. (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B33">2016</xref>) which was based on LSA cosine similarities (Experiment <xref ref-type="supplementary-material" rid="SM1">1</xref>) and HAL cosine similarities (Experiment <xref ref-type="supplementary-material" rid="SM2">2</xref>). Extending the original study, we used semantic spaces created from far larger corpora, and implemented several additional methodological improvements. In Experiment <xref ref-type="supplementary-material" rid="SM1">1</xref>, we only found a significant effect of HAL cosines on lexical decision times, while we found significant effects for both LSA and HAL cosines in Experiment <xref ref-type="supplementary-material" rid="SM2">2</xref>. As further supported by an analysis of the pooled data from both experiments, this indicates that HAL cosines are a better predictor of priming effects than LSA cosines. Taken together, the results replicate the finding that priming effects can be predicted from distributional semantic similarity measures.</p>