Christina Gagne | University of Alberta (original) (raw)

Papers by Christina Gagne

Behavior Research Methods

The Large Database of English Pseudo-compounds (LaDEP) contains nearly 7500 English words which m... more The Large Database of English Pseudo-compounds (LaDEP) contains nearly 7500 English words which mimic, but do not truly possess, a compound morphemic structure. These pseudo-compounds can be parsed into two free morpheme constituents (e.g., car-pet), but neither constituent functions as a morpheme within the overall word structure. The items were manually coded as pseudo-compounds, further coded for features related to their morphological structure (e.g., presence of multiple affixes, as in ruler-ship), and summarized using common psycholinguistic variables (e.g., length, frequency). This paper also presents an example analysis comparing the lexical decision response times between compound words, pseudo-compound words, and monomorphemic words. Pseudo-compounds and monomorphemic words did not differ in response time, and both groups had slower response times than compound words. This analysis replicates the facilitatory effect of compound constituents during lexical processing, and d...

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2014

Early verbal-memory researchers assumed participants represent memory of a pair of unrelated item... more Early verbal-memory researchers assumed participants represent memory of a pair of unrelated items with 2 independent, separately modifiable, directional associations. However, memory for pairs of unrelated words (A-B) exhibits associative symmetry: a near-perfect correlation between accuracy on forward (A¡?) and backward (?¢B) cued recall. This was viewed as arguing against the independentassociations hypothesis and in favor of the hypothesis that associations are remembered as holistic units. Here we test the Holistic Representation hypothesis further by examining cued recall of compound words. If we suppose preexisting words are more unitized than novel associations, the Holistic Representation hypothesis predicts compound words (e.g., ROSE BUD) will have a higher forward-backward correlation than novel compounds (e.g., BRIEF TAX). We report the opposite finding: Compound words, as well as noncompound words, exhibited less associative symmetry than novel compounds. This challenges the Holistic Representation account of associative symmetry. Moreover, preexperimental associates (positional family size) influenced associative symmetry-but asymmetrically: Increasing family size of the last constituent increasing decoupled forward and backward recall, but family size of the 1st constituent had no such effect. In short, highly practiced, meaningful associations exhibit associative asymmetry, suggesting associative symmetry is not diagnostic of holistic representations but, rather, is a characteristic of ad hoc associations. With additional learning, symmetric associations may be replaced by directional, independently modifiable associations as verbal associations become embedded within a rich knowledge structure.

Proceedings of the Third Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2016, 2016

Human ratings of hyponymy for 2754 English compound words, The stimuli were selected from the Lar... more Human ratings of hyponymy for 2754 English compound words, The stimuli were selected from the Large Database of English Compounds (LADEC Gagné, Spalding, & Schmidtke, 2019) which is a database of over 8000 English closed (i.e., unspaced) compounds along with various psycholinguistic properties including several measures of semantic transparency (based on human ratings and corpus-based measures of association). In total, 2574 compounds were selected were divided into nine lists ranging from 200 to 354 items. Each list was used for one experiment for a total of nine experiments collected across a 2 year period and was seen by 97 to 121 participants. In total, 936 native speakers of English from the University of Alberta participated in the study. The responses were aggregated to obtain the percentage of participants responding yes for each item.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

Semantic transparency is widely believed to affect the processing of compound words. It has been ... more Semantic transparency is widely believed to affect the processing of compound words. It has been described as the degree to which the meaning of the constituent is retained in the meaning of the whole compound, but also as the degree to which the meaning of the compound is predictable from the meaning of the constituents. Furthermore, semantic transparency has been operationalized in various ways (e.g., Libben 2010; Libben et al. 2003; Sandra 1990). We describe a study in which transparency was measured based on: 1) linguistic criteria used by informed judges, 2) participant ratings of a) how predictable a compound’s meaning was from its parts, and b) the extent that each constituent retains its meaning in the compound, 3) Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA; Landauer & Dumais 1997) scores for the compound and each constituent. We used these measures to test the claim that meaning retention ratings reflect the semantic similarity between a compound’s meaning and the constituent meaning, w...

Psycholinguistic research generally adopts a scientific strategy that assumes a relatively stable... more Psycholinguistic research generally adopts a scientific strategy that assumes a relatively stable set of representations and processes. In accordance with this strategy, researchers average measurements across trials, in an attempt to get a statistically stable estimate of performance for a given experimental condition. In this paper, we present four sets of example data drawn from various psycholinguistic tasks and show that the psycholinguistic system appears to adapt across the trials of the experiments. We show that there are cases in which a factor has no main effect, but interacts across trial; in other cases there is a main effect of a factor, but that factor also interacts with trial. Finally, we show that there are some cases in which the way that a factor interacts across trials is dependent on other, unrelated conditions included in the experiment. Our discussion focuses on both theoretical and methodological implications of the adaptiveness of the psycholinguistic system.

Symposium: The Diversity of Conceptual Combination. M ODERATOR Fintan Costello (Fintan.Costello@u... more Symposium: The Diversity of Conceptual Combination. M ODERATOR Fintan Costello (Fintan.Costello@ucd.ie), Department of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland. Fintan Costello (Fintan.Costello@ucd.ie), S PEAKERS Department of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland. Zachary Estes (estes@uga.edu), Christina Gagne (cgagne@ualberta.ca), Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta. Edward Wisniewski (edw@uncg.edu), Psychology Department, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia. Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, North Carolina. Introduction A fundamental aspect of everyday language comprehension is the interpretation of novel compound phrases through conceptual combination: a mechanism that is engaged whenever people interpret phrases like sand gun , cactus fish or pet shark . Conceptual combination is a diverse and complex cognitive process: people are able to combine concepts in a variety ...

Methods in Psychology, 2020

Journal of Memory and Language, 2020

Hyponymy is a semantic relation of class inclusion (e.g., a cat is an animal; a wildcat is a cat)... more Hyponymy is a semantic relation of class inclusion (e.g., a cat is an animal; a wildcat is a cat). Compound words are often, but not always, in a hyponymic relationship with the second constituent of the compound, as in wildcat and cat. This paper introduces a set of human ratings of hyponymy for over 2500 English compound words, which will facilitate research on the role of hyponymy in compound word processing and related areas. In the compound word processing literature, the semantic transparency of the compound (i.e., the extent to which the meaning of the constituents is maintained in the compound) is a critical theoretical construct. We investigate the role that hyponymy plays in the semantic transparency of compound words, as well as in the processing of compound words. We find that hyponymy is a critical component of the semantic transparency of both the second constituent (e.g., cat) and the compound as a whole (e.g., wildcat) and somewhat surprisingly also of the first constituent (e.g., wild). Hyponymy also affects the speed of processing of compound words in both lexical decision and naming.

Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2018

Prior studies of noun-noun compound word processing have provided insight into the human capacity... more Prior studies of noun-noun compound word processing have provided insight into the human capacity for conceptual combination (Gagné and Shoben Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23(1), 71 1997; Spalding, Gagné, Mullaly & Ji Linguistische Berichte Sonderheft, 17, 283-315 2010). These studies conclude that relational interpretations of compound words are proposed and appraised by the language system during online word recognition. However, little is known about how the capacity for creating new meanings from existing conceptual units develops within an individual mind. Though current theories imply that individual relational knowledge about the combinability of concepts develops as language experience accumulates, this hypothesis has not been previously tested experimentally. Here, we addressed this hypothesis in a task that assesses individual relational knowledge of English compound words. We report that greater experience with printed language shap...

Lingue E Linguaggio, May 25, 2014

Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, Jan 18, 2016

We used a typing task to measure the written production of compounds, pseudocompounds, and monomo... more We used a typing task to measure the written production of compounds, pseudocompounds, and monomorphemic words on a letter-by-letter basis to determine whether written production (as measured by interletter typing speed) was affected by morphemic structure and semantic transparency of the constituents. Semantic transparency was analyzed using a dichotomous classification (opaque vs. transparent) as well as participant ratings. Our results indicate that written production is sensitive to morphemic structure and to the semantic transparency of the first constituent. (PsycINFO Database Record

Morphology, 2015

The results of research on the processing of morphologically complex words are consistent with a ... more The results of research on the processing of morphologically complex words are consistent with a lexical system that activates both whole-word and constituent representations during word recognition. In this study, we focus on written production and examine whether semantically priming the first constituent of a compound influences the ease of producing a compound (as measured by typing latencies), and whether any such priming effect depends on the semantic transparency of the compound’s constituents. We found that semantic transparency of the constituents affects whether semantic priming results in changes to processing. However, it is not only the semantic transparency of the primed constituent that exerts an influence—for example, the semantic transparency of the head affects whether semantically priming the modifier results in a change in typing times. We discuss these effects in terms of competition among the various representations as the compound is output, such that overall performance is a combination of facilitation and inhibition that changes over the course of the output.

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2015

Studies in Morphology, 2015

Lieber (Morphology and lexical semantics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004; A lexical ... more Lieber (Morphology and lexical semantics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004; A lexical semantic approach to compounding. In: Lieber R, Štekauer P (eds) The Oxford handbook of compounding, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009) suggests that semantic-encyclopedic knowledge plays an important role in determining the meaning of a compound. In this chapter, we discuss psycholinguistic research demonstrating that conceptual knowledge influences the interpretation of compound words and noun phrases both in terms of a relationbased gist interpretation (e.g., a green apple is an apple that is green) and in terms of specific content (e.g., green apples are sour). We present evidence indicating that judgments about the properties of modified nouns are affected not only by the content of the constituent concepts but also by meta-knowledge about how subcategories relate to categories.

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 2014

The modification effect refers to the finding that likelihood ratings for statements using modifi... more The modification effect refers to the finding that likelihood ratings for statements using modified concepts (e.g., baby ducks have webbed feet) are lower than for statements using the unmodified head concept (e.g., ducks have webbed feet). One explanation for this effect is that people are reluctant to attribute properties to a combined concept due to general uncertainty about the combined concept. Across four experiments, we examined three sources of uncertainty (i.e., modifier, relational structure and category membership) and found that reducing uncertainty does not remove the modification effect. In addition, the results demonstrate that the modification effect is not unique to decisions concerning combined concepts, but extends to single-name subcategories. The results of these experiments indicate that the modification effect results from inferences based on meta-knowledge about category–subcategory relations.

Behavior Research Methods

The Large Database of English Pseudo-compounds (LaDEP) contains nearly 7500 English words which m... more The Large Database of English Pseudo-compounds (LaDEP) contains nearly 7500 English words which mimic, but do not truly possess, a compound morphemic structure. These pseudo-compounds can be parsed into two free morpheme constituents (e.g., car-pet), but neither constituent functions as a morpheme within the overall word structure. The items were manually coded as pseudo-compounds, further coded for features related to their morphological structure (e.g., presence of multiple affixes, as in ruler-ship), and summarized using common psycholinguistic variables (e.g., length, frequency). This paper also presents an example analysis comparing the lexical decision response times between compound words, pseudo-compound words, and monomorphemic words. Pseudo-compounds and monomorphemic words did not differ in response time, and both groups had slower response times than compound words. This analysis replicates the facilitatory effect of compound constituents during lexical processing, and d...

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2014

Early verbal-memory researchers assumed participants represent memory of a pair of unrelated item... more Early verbal-memory researchers assumed participants represent memory of a pair of unrelated items with 2 independent, separately modifiable, directional associations. However, memory for pairs of unrelated words (A-B) exhibits associative symmetry: a near-perfect correlation between accuracy on forward (A¡?) and backward (?¢B) cued recall. This was viewed as arguing against the independentassociations hypothesis and in favor of the hypothesis that associations are remembered as holistic units. Here we test the Holistic Representation hypothesis further by examining cued recall of compound words. If we suppose preexisting words are more unitized than novel associations, the Holistic Representation hypothesis predicts compound words (e.g., ROSE BUD) will have a higher forward-backward correlation than novel compounds (e.g., BRIEF TAX). We report the opposite finding: Compound words, as well as noncompound words, exhibited less associative symmetry than novel compounds. This challenges the Holistic Representation account of associative symmetry. Moreover, preexperimental associates (positional family size) influenced associative symmetry-but asymmetrically: Increasing family size of the last constituent increasing decoupled forward and backward recall, but family size of the 1st constituent had no such effect. In short, highly practiced, meaningful associations exhibit associative asymmetry, suggesting associative symmetry is not diagnostic of holistic representations but, rather, is a characteristic of ad hoc associations. With additional learning, symmetric associations may be replaced by directional, independently modifiable associations as verbal associations become embedded within a rich knowledge structure.

Proceedings of the Third Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2016, 2016

Human ratings of hyponymy for 2754 English compound words, The stimuli were selected from the Lar... more Human ratings of hyponymy for 2754 English compound words, The stimuli were selected from the Large Database of English Compounds (LADEC Gagné, Spalding, & Schmidtke, 2019) which is a database of over 8000 English closed (i.e., unspaced) compounds along with various psycholinguistic properties including several measures of semantic transparency (based on human ratings and corpus-based measures of association). In total, 2574 compounds were selected were divided into nine lists ranging from 200 to 354 items. Each list was used for one experiment for a total of nine experiments collected across a 2 year period and was seen by 97 to 121 participants. In total, 936 native speakers of English from the University of Alberta participated in the study. The responses were aggregated to obtain the percentage of participants responding yes for each item.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

Semantic transparency is widely believed to affect the processing of compound words. It has been ... more Semantic transparency is widely believed to affect the processing of compound words. It has been described as the degree to which the meaning of the constituent is retained in the meaning of the whole compound, but also as the degree to which the meaning of the compound is predictable from the meaning of the constituents. Furthermore, semantic transparency has been operationalized in various ways (e.g., Libben 2010; Libben et al. 2003; Sandra 1990). We describe a study in which transparency was measured based on: 1) linguistic criteria used by informed judges, 2) participant ratings of a) how predictable a compound’s meaning was from its parts, and b) the extent that each constituent retains its meaning in the compound, 3) Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA; Landauer & Dumais 1997) scores for the compound and each constituent. We used these measures to test the claim that meaning retention ratings reflect the semantic similarity between a compound’s meaning and the constituent meaning, w...

Psycholinguistic research generally adopts a scientific strategy that assumes a relatively stable... more Psycholinguistic research generally adopts a scientific strategy that assumes a relatively stable set of representations and processes. In accordance with this strategy, researchers average measurements across trials, in an attempt to get a statistically stable estimate of performance for a given experimental condition. In this paper, we present four sets of example data drawn from various psycholinguistic tasks and show that the psycholinguistic system appears to adapt across the trials of the experiments. We show that there are cases in which a factor has no main effect, but interacts across trial; in other cases there is a main effect of a factor, but that factor also interacts with trial. Finally, we show that there are some cases in which the way that a factor interacts across trials is dependent on other, unrelated conditions included in the experiment. Our discussion focuses on both theoretical and methodological implications of the adaptiveness of the psycholinguistic system.

Symposium: The Diversity of Conceptual Combination. M ODERATOR Fintan Costello (Fintan.Costello@u... more Symposium: The Diversity of Conceptual Combination. M ODERATOR Fintan Costello (Fintan.Costello@ucd.ie), Department of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland. Fintan Costello (Fintan.Costello@ucd.ie), S PEAKERS Department of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland. Zachary Estes (estes@uga.edu), Christina Gagne (cgagne@ualberta.ca), Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta. Edward Wisniewski (edw@uncg.edu), Psychology Department, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia. Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, North Carolina. Introduction A fundamental aspect of everyday language comprehension is the interpretation of novel compound phrases through conceptual combination: a mechanism that is engaged whenever people interpret phrases like sand gun , cactus fish or pet shark . Conceptual combination is a diverse and complex cognitive process: people are able to combine concepts in a variety ...

Methods in Psychology, 2020

Journal of Memory and Language, 2020

Hyponymy is a semantic relation of class inclusion (e.g., a cat is an animal; a wildcat is a cat)... more Hyponymy is a semantic relation of class inclusion (e.g., a cat is an animal; a wildcat is a cat). Compound words are often, but not always, in a hyponymic relationship with the second constituent of the compound, as in wildcat and cat. This paper introduces a set of human ratings of hyponymy for over 2500 English compound words, which will facilitate research on the role of hyponymy in compound word processing and related areas. In the compound word processing literature, the semantic transparency of the compound (i.e., the extent to which the meaning of the constituents is maintained in the compound) is a critical theoretical construct. We investigate the role that hyponymy plays in the semantic transparency of compound words, as well as in the processing of compound words. We find that hyponymy is a critical component of the semantic transparency of both the second constituent (e.g., cat) and the compound as a whole (e.g., wildcat) and somewhat surprisingly also of the first constituent (e.g., wild). Hyponymy also affects the speed of processing of compound words in both lexical decision and naming.

Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2018

Prior studies of noun-noun compound word processing have provided insight into the human capacity... more Prior studies of noun-noun compound word processing have provided insight into the human capacity for conceptual combination (Gagné and Shoben Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23(1), 71 1997; Spalding, Gagné, Mullaly & Ji Linguistische Berichte Sonderheft, 17, 283-315 2010). These studies conclude that relational interpretations of compound words are proposed and appraised by the language system during online word recognition. However, little is known about how the capacity for creating new meanings from existing conceptual units develops within an individual mind. Though current theories imply that individual relational knowledge about the combinability of concepts develops as language experience accumulates, this hypothesis has not been previously tested experimentally. Here, we addressed this hypothesis in a task that assesses individual relational knowledge of English compound words. We report that greater experience with printed language shap...

Lingue E Linguaggio, May 25, 2014

Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, Jan 18, 2016

We used a typing task to measure the written production of compounds, pseudocompounds, and monomo... more We used a typing task to measure the written production of compounds, pseudocompounds, and monomorphemic words on a letter-by-letter basis to determine whether written production (as measured by interletter typing speed) was affected by morphemic structure and semantic transparency of the constituents. Semantic transparency was analyzed using a dichotomous classification (opaque vs. transparent) as well as participant ratings. Our results indicate that written production is sensitive to morphemic structure and to the semantic transparency of the first constituent. (PsycINFO Database Record

Morphology, 2015

The results of research on the processing of morphologically complex words are consistent with a ... more The results of research on the processing of morphologically complex words are consistent with a lexical system that activates both whole-word and constituent representations during word recognition. In this study, we focus on written production and examine whether semantically priming the first constituent of a compound influences the ease of producing a compound (as measured by typing latencies), and whether any such priming effect depends on the semantic transparency of the compound’s constituents. We found that semantic transparency of the constituents affects whether semantic priming results in changes to processing. However, it is not only the semantic transparency of the primed constituent that exerts an influence—for example, the semantic transparency of the head affects whether semantically priming the modifier results in a change in typing times. We discuss these effects in terms of competition among the various representations as the compound is output, such that overall performance is a combination of facilitation and inhibition that changes over the course of the output.

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2015

Studies in Morphology, 2015

Lieber (Morphology and lexical semantics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004; A lexical ... more Lieber (Morphology and lexical semantics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004; A lexical semantic approach to compounding. In: Lieber R, Štekauer P (eds) The Oxford handbook of compounding, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009) suggests that semantic-encyclopedic knowledge plays an important role in determining the meaning of a compound. In this chapter, we discuss psycholinguistic research demonstrating that conceptual knowledge influences the interpretation of compound words and noun phrases both in terms of a relationbased gist interpretation (e.g., a green apple is an apple that is green) and in terms of specific content (e.g., green apples are sour). We present evidence indicating that judgments about the properties of modified nouns are affected not only by the content of the constituent concepts but also by meta-knowledge about how subcategories relate to categories.

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 2014

The modification effect refers to the finding that likelihood ratings for statements using modifi... more The modification effect refers to the finding that likelihood ratings for statements using modified concepts (e.g., baby ducks have webbed feet) are lower than for statements using the unmodified head concept (e.g., ducks have webbed feet). One explanation for this effect is that people are reluctant to attribute properties to a combined concept due to general uncertainty about the combined concept. Across four experiments, we examined three sources of uncertainty (i.e., modifier, relational structure and category membership) and found that reducing uncertainty does not remove the modification effect. In addition, the results demonstrate that the modification effect is not unique to decisions concerning combined concepts, but extends to single-name subcategories. The results of these experiments indicate that the modification effect results from inferences based on meta-knowledge about category–subcategory relations.

This book introduces the Aristotelian-Thomistic view of the human person to a contemporary audien... more This book introduces the Aristotelian-Thomistic view of the human person to a contemporary audience, and reviews the ways in which this view could provide a philosophically sound foundation for modern psychology. The book presents the current state of psychology and offers critiques of the current philosophical foundations. In its presentation of the fundamental metaphysical commitments of the Aristotelian-Thomistic view, it places the human being within the broader understanding of the world.

Chapters discuss the Aristotelian-Thomistic view of human and non-human cognition as well as the relationship between cognition and emotion. In addition, the book discusses the Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of human growth and development, including how the virtue theory relates to current psychological approaches to normal human development, the development of character problems that lead to psychopathology, current conceptions of positive psychology, and the place of the individual in the social world. The book ends with a summary of how Aristotelian-Thomistic theory relates to science in general and psychology in particular.

The Human Person will be of interest to psychologists and cognitive scientists working within a number of subfields, including developmental psychology, social psychology, cognitive psychology, and clinical psychology, and to philosophers working on the philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, and the interaction between historical philosophy and contemporary science, as well as linguists and computer scientists interested in psychology of language and artificial intelligence.