Characterizing the semantic and form-based similarity spaces of the mental lexicon by means of the multi-arrangement method

Collecting human similarity judgments is instrumental to measuring and modeling neurocognitive representations (e.g., through representational similarity analysis) and has been made more efficient by the multi-arrangement task. While this task has been tested for collecting semantic similarity judgments, it is unclear whether it also lends itself to phonological and orthographic similarity judgments of words. We have extended the task to include these lexical modalities and compared the results between modalities and against computational models. We find that similarity judgments can be collected for all three modalities, although word forms were considered more difficult to sort and resulted in less consistent inter- and intra-rater agreement than semantics. For all three modalities we can construct stable group-level representational similarity matrices. However, these do not capture significant idiosyncratic similarity information unique to each participant. We discuss the potential underlying causes for differences between modalities and their effect on the application of the multi-arrangement task.

Automated summary

Collecting human similarity judgments is crucial for measuring and modeling neurocognitive representations. This study found that the multi-arrangement task can efficiently collect similarity judgments for semantic, phonological, and orthographic modalities. However, sorting word forms was more difficult and had less consistency compared to semantics. Group-level representational similarity matrices were successfully constructed for all three modalities, but failed to capture individual idiosyncratic similarity information.