affect, concreteness, corpus linguistics, cognitive science, cognitive linguistics, stereotype accuracy, national character stereotypes, semantic prosody / Increasing use of natural language corpora and methods from corpus and computational linguistics as a
supplement to traditional modes of scholarship in the social sciences and humanities has been labeled the
"text as data movement." Corpora afford greater scope in terms of sample sizes, time, geography, and subject
populations, as well as the opportunity to ecologically validate theories by testing their predictions within
behaviour which is not elicited by an experimenter. Herein, five projects are presented, each either exploiting
or taking inspiration from natural language data to make novel contributions to a subject matter area in
the psychological sciences, including social psychology and psycholinguistics. Additionally, each project
incorporates notions of word meaning grounded in psycholinguistic and psychoevolutionary theory, either the
affective or sensorimotor connotations of words. This thesis ends with a discussion of the necessity of taking
both experimental and observational approaches, as well as the challenge of how to link natural language
data to psychological constructs. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The internet and modern computers are changing how scientists study the mind. Instead of doing experiments
within a laboratory, it is more and more common for cognitive scientists to observe patterns in online language
use. These patterns in language use are then used to comment on how the mind works. Online language
use is created by diverse people as they go about their lives. This is valuable for scientists studying the
mind. Our experiments are often limited by how many people and which people do experiments. Sometimes,
experiments can be misleading because people don't act in the real world like they do in a lab. This thesis
has five studies, each using online language use to comment on some part of how the mind works. Also, each
study involves how words make people feel, or whether a word refers to something you can see or touch.
Studying real people as they communicate offers new perspectives on old ideas or unanswered questions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/24760 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Snefjella, Bryor |
| Contributors | Kuperman, Victor, Cognitive Science of Language |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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