Are valence and arousal related to the development of amodal representations of words? A computational study

ABSTRACT

In this study, we analyzed the relationship between the amodal (semantic) development of words and two popular emotional norms (emotional valence and arousal) in English and Spanish languages. To do so, we combined the strengths of semantics from vector space models (vector length, semantic diversity, and word maturity measures), and feature-based models of emotions. First, we generated a common vector space representing the meaning of words at different developmental stages (five and four developmental stages for English and Spanish, respectively) using the Word Maturity methodology to align different vector spaces. Second, we analyzed the amodal development of words through mixed-effects models with crossed random effects for words and variables using a continuous time metric. Third, the emotional norms were included as covariates in the statistical models. We evaluated more than 23,000 words, whose emotional norms were available for more than 10,000 words, in each language separately. Results showed a curve of amodal development with an increasing linear effect and a small quadratic deceleration. A relevant influence on the amodal development of words was found only for emotional valence (not for arousal), suggesting that positive words have an earlier amodal development and a less pronounced semantic change across early lifespan.

KEYWORDS:

• Development
• words
• emotions
• emotional valence
• semantics

Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to SALSA Lab (Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado, Boulder) for sharing the TASA corpus. We also would like to thank Fritz Günther for his help to obtain the English corpus-based data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The amodal (semantic) measures of all the words of the vector space models at each developmental stage and the code for data analysis are available in the OSF project with DOI:10.17605/OSF.IO/9XCT6.

Notes

1 Amodal representations of words can be understood as semantic representations. Amodal representations refer to how words are related to each other propositionally and conceptually (e.g., “pain” and “blood” are semantically related by means of common amodal contexts). In contrast, modal representations refer to encoded sensorimotor and emotional information in a purer state (e.g., “pain” and “blood” encode negative emotional information).

2 Note that we use linguistic corpora of academic texts, fables, and tales adapted to each developmental stage, although a more valid and desirable scenario would have been to use natural language corpora produced by children at different developmental stages.

3 The interpolation of values (that is, inferring trajectories of meaning change from the beginning of their acquisition to the adult state) is one of the objectives of Word Maturity methodology (e.g., Jorge-Botana et al., 2017, 2018). In this line, MEMs-CR with a continuous time metric can be an affordable tool to interpolate the complete trajectories of the amodal development of words for any time t, and to study the influence of covariates in such trajectories. The OSF project contains the R scripts to replicate the analyses.

4 Note that the estimated effects of time were similar in the models with and without emotional norms as covariates.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.