Exploring Semantic Relatedness Judgments in the Structure of a Semantic Network
Drawing upon work by De Deyne et al. (2016), I explore a model of spreading activation through a semantic network in regards to how different kinds of semantic relationships are encoded in said network. In particular, I examine the contribution of indirect pathways through the network to explain differences in similarity judgments of sensorimotor and linguistic relationships between pairs of words. I propose that the structure of a semantic network encodes properties that distinguish these two types of semantic relationships that are not revealed by measures of association strength that only examine direct connections within the network. A cosine similarity measure extracted from a spreading activation model is compared to a measure of association strength in accounting for observed similarity judgments, and a model for examining the differential contributions of various random walk pathways through a semantic network in the encoding of sensorimotor and linguistic semantic relationships is presented.