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Abstract

The present paper developed a conceptual framework and a technique of studying the communicative meaning of words, and explored the relation of communication meaning with other known meaning dimensions. The communicative meaning of each of the 98 nouns was measured in terms of the homogeneity of associative responses elicited by the nouns and the reliability of the resulting scale SCI was tested. The intergroup reliability coefficient was 0.941. The correlation of the scale with five other meaning attributes, imagery (I), Concreteness (C), meaningfulness (m), dictionary meaning (DM) and affective meaning intensity (AMI), showed that the SCI measure was positively correlated with I, C, and m. Several hypotheses regarding the SCI measure were tested to highlight the nature of the scale.

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Measure of Communicative Meaning of Words: The Semantic Consensus Index

Abstract

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References