Latent semantics of action verbs reflect phonetic parameters of intensity and emotional content
This research addresses how language structure might encode sensory-motor information, offering insights for linguistics and cognitive science, but it is incremental as it builds on prior work linking phonetics to semantics.
The study investigated whether the latent semantics of action verbs correlate with phonetic parameters, finding that verbs cluster into movement and emotional categories based on vowel positions and formant shifts, with front/back vowels linked to arousal levels and jaw movements to valence.
Conjuring up our thoughts, language reflects statistical patterns of word co-occurrences which in turn come to describe how we perceive the world. Whether counting how frequently nouns and verbs combine in Google search queries, or extracting eigenvectors from term document matrices made up of Wikipedia lines and Shakespeare plots, the resulting latent semantics capture not only the associative links which form concepts, but also spatial dimensions embedded within the surface structure of language. As both the shape and movements of objects have been found to be associated with phonetic contrasts already in toddlers, this study explores whether articulatory and acoustic parameters may likewise differentiate the latent semantics of action verbs. Selecting 3 x 20 emotion, face, and hand related verbs known to activate premotor areas in the brain, their mutual cosine similarities were computed using latent semantic analysis LSA, and the resulting adjacency matrices were compared based on two different large scale text corpora; HAWIK and TASA. Applying hierarchical clustering to identify common structures across the two text corpora, the verbs largely divide into combined mouth and hand movements versus emotional expressions. Transforming the verbs into their constituent phonemes, the clustered small and large size movements appear differentiated by front versus back vowels corresponding to increasing levels of arousal. Whereas the clustered emotional verbs seem characterized by sequences of close versus open jaw produced phonemes, generating up- or downwards shifts in formant frequencies that may influence their perceived valence. Suggesting, that the latent semantics of action verbs reflect parameters of intensity and emotional polarity that appear correlated with the articulatory contrasts and acoustic characteristics of phonemes