Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.22210/suvlin.2025.099.03
Psycholinguistic variables in lexical–semantic processing of antonyms
Janja Čulig Suknaić
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
*
Dora Uštulica
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
*
* Corresponding author.
Abstract
In this study we have aimed to examine the role of psycholinguistic variables in the lexical–semantic processing of antonyms. The focus of the study was on the impact of convention on processing antonym pairs, as expressed with the psycholinguistic variable of reaction time. The aim was to further clarify antonymy, not only as a linguistic, but also as a conceptual phenomenon. We used a reaction time experiment to test processing of three different categories of antonyms. Namely, those classified, upon doing a corpus analysis to determine their respective frequencies, as highly conventionalized, less conventionalized and unconventional. Our experiment has confirmed that there is indeed correlation between convention, as expressed by frequency, and reaction time. We take that as just another confirmation of antonymy being not only a lexical but a conceptual phenomenon too, in which both the knowledge of the language and the knowledge of the world play an important part. Finally, we have laid out some of the ways in which this linguistic and conceptual phenomenon could be further studied to get more reliable results to account for the observed effects.
Keywords
antonymy; conventions (semantics); reaction time; psycholinguistic research; English
Hrčak ID:
334025
URI
Publication date:
25.7.2025.
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