Semantic neighbourhoods: There’s an app for that

Abstract The contributions of semantic processing have come under increasing attention in recent years (Yap, Pexman, Wellsby, Hargreaves, & Huff, 2012), and variables that measure the semantic content of words are a requirement of this increased experimental attention. The density and size of semantic neighborhoods derived from computational models have been shown to predict reaction times across a range of psycholinguistic tasks (e.g., Danguecan & Buchanan, 2016), and the distance between two words in semantic space has been shown to predict priming (Kenett, Levi, Anaki & Faust, 2017). The data to support the construction of stimulus sets that use these variables are complicated to obtain. The app that we describe here makes these measures of semantics available for 100,000 English words.

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