Structural Stability of Lexical Semantic Spaces: Nouns in Chinese and French

TL;DR

This study investigates the semantic organization of nouns in Chinese and French using EEG and corpus data, revealing stable cross-linguistic patterns in lexical semantics related to living/nonliving distinctions and prototypicality.

Contribution

It introduces a novel cross-linguistic comparison of lexical semantic spaces using electrophysiological and corpus data, highlighting shared organizational principles.

Findings

Living/nonliving distinction is a main factor in both languages.

Greater dispersion of living categories compared to nonliving.

Animals are prototypical within the living categories.

Abstract

Many studies in the neurosciences have dealt with the semantic processing of words or categories, but few have looked into the semantic organization of the lexicon thought as a system. The present study was designed to try to move towards this goal, using both electrophysiological and corpus-based data, and to compare two languages from different families: French and Mandarin Chinese. We conducted an EEG-based semantic-decision experiment using 240 words from eight categories (clothing, parts of a house, tools, vehicles, fruits/vegetables, animals, body parts, and people) as the material. A data-analysis method (correspondence analysis) commonly used in computational linguistics was applied to the electrophysiological signals. The present cross-language comparison indicated stability for the following aspects of the languages' lexical semantic organizations: (1) the living/nonliving distinction, which showed up as a main factor for both languages; (2) greater dispersion of the living categories as compared to the nonliving ones; (3) prototypicality of the \emph{animals} category within the living categories, and with respect to the living/nonliving distinction; and (4) the existence of a person-centered reference gradient. Our electrophysiological analysis indicated stability of the networks at play in each of these processes. Stability was also observed in the data taken from word usage in the languages (synonyms and associated words obtained from textual corpora).