Charles E. Osgood

Hesitation Phenomena in Spontaneous English Speech

[This paper reports an exploratory investigation of hesitation phenomena in spontaneously spoken English. Following a brief review of the literature bearing on such phenomena, a quantitative study of filled and unfilled pauses, repeats, and false starts in the speech of some twelve participants in a conference is described. Analysis in terms of both individual differences and linguistic distribution is made, and some psycholinguistic implications are drawn, particularly as to the nature of encoding units and their relative uncertainty. A distinction between non-chance statistical dependencies and all-or-nothing dependencies in linguistic methodology is made.]

The pollyanna hypothesis

The Pollyanna Hypothesis asserts that there is a universal human tendency to use evaluatively positive words (E+) more frequently and diversely than evaluatively negative words (E−) in communicating. Drawing on existing cross-cultural and developmental data, it was demonstrated that (a) across a sample of 13 language/culture communities E+ members of evaluative scales are used significantly more frequently and diversely than their E− opposites, (b) across 11 of these communities negative affixes are applied significantly more often to the E+ members of pairs (to make the E− opposite) than to the E− members (to make the E+ opposite), and (c) across age levels from 7 through 11 E+ members of evaluative pairs appear earlier, have higher frequencies and diversities of usage and take the negative affix more frequently than their E− opposites. Possible biases in the data and alternatives to the Pollyanna hypothesis are considered.

A Cross-Cultural Study of the Affective Meanings of Color

Color data from the Osgood et al. 23-culture semantic differential study of affective meanings reveal cross-cultural similarities in feelings about colors. The concept RED is affectively quite salient. BLACK and GREY are bad, and WHITE, BLUE, and GREEN are good. YELLOW, WHITE, and GREY are weak; RED and BLACK are strong. BLACK and GREY are passive; RED is active. The color component Brightness, as determined by comparing data on WHITE, GREY, and BLACK, is strongly associated with positive Evaluation, but also with negative Potency. Eighty-nine previous studies of color and affect were analyzed. They generally support these findings, and, together with the fact that there are very few exceptions in our data or the literature, lead one to believe that there are strong universal trends in the attribution of affect in the color domain.

Salience of the word as a unit in the perception of language

Seven interlocking experiments are reported in which both guessing and recognition thresholds for words are compared with those for other linguistic units both smaller than (nonword morphemes and trigrams) and larger than (nominal compounds, ordinary noun phrases, and nonsense compounds) the word. Thresholds were consistently lower for words than for morphemes or trigams (matched or even much higher in visual usage frequency) and lower for word-like nominal compounds (e.g.,stumbling block) than for ordinary noun phrases (copper block) or nonsense compounds (sympathy block). Prior exposure (through two correct recognitions) to ordinary noun phrases, nonsense compounds, and the constituent single words of nominal compounds significantly facilitated subsequent recognition of the single-word constituents, but prior exposure to nominal compounds had no effect whatsoever on subsequent recognition of their sin~e-word constituents. These results as a whole are interpreted as supporting the following conclusions: (1)that the word has special salience in the perception of language; (2)that the reason for this salience is the unique meaningfulness of the word (or the word-like nominal compound) as a whole; and (3) that the mechanism for this salience is the convergence of feedback from central mediational processes with feed-forward from peripheral sensory processes upon the integration of word-form percepts.

Processing times for English and Chinese words.

American subjects and Hong Kong Chinese subjects were asked to judge the positive/negative affective polarity of words in their respective languages. Response times were significantly quicker for Chinese, although there was no difference in latencies in simply pronouncing “positive” and “negative” in the two languages. Pronunciation durations for the English test words, however, were shorter than those for Chinese. The results are related to the alphabetic versus morphemic nature of English and Chinese, and to their difference in the requirement for phonological recoding in word processing.

Pollyanna II: Two Types of Negativity

Summary Subjects (N = 28) were asked to push either one of two buttons to indicate if the affective polarity of presented words was congruent with a preceding cue. In the simple congruent situation, positive words had faster response times, but in the incongruent situation the reverse was found. Incongruence interacted with affective negativity, as predicted from the psychological affect theory relating meanings of signs to associated behaviors. Linguistically marked and unmarked words that have either positive or negative affective meanings were also used in this study, and the results obtained were inconsistent with the semantic marking theory but consistent with the psychological affect theory.

On the strategy of cross-national research into subjective culture *

Technological developments of the twentieth century, particularly the two decades since World War II, are producing a major revolution in Man’s way of life all across the world. They are also producing a revolution in the social and behavioral sciences. Transportation and communication technologies have shrunk the planet politically, socially and psychologically and they are making it possible to do research on an international scale that would have been inconceivable only a few years ago. Automation and computer technologies are moving us toward a

FROM YANG AND YIN TO AND OR BUT IN CROSS CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

Abstract Ancient Chinese metaphysics, as recorded some 4000 years ago in I Ching, the Book of Changes, expresses three fundamental characteristics of human thinking: (1) bipolar organization of the dimensions of cognitions; (2) attributions of positive polarity to the Yang pole and negative to the Yin; (3) parallelism in the orientation of the dimensions in terms of underlying Positiveness/Negativeness. In this paper, eight postulates governing the dynamics of interactions among cognitions are presented, utilizing both linguistic and psychological evidence, These postulates are used to predict the performance of native speakers of 12 languages - American English, Belgian Flemish, Swedish, Finnish, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, Turkish, Iranian Farsi, Hindi, Malaysian, Thai and Japanese - on a simple cognitive task: the insertion of their equivalents otand vs. but in the conjunction of pairs of familiar adjectives, X is ADJt —ADJ2 (e.g., X is tail BUT weak). The comparably measured affective meanings of the p...

Effects of grammatical form-class set upon perception of grammatically ambiguous English words

Three independent groups of ten subjects each were assigned to three levels of set for grammatical form-class: noun set, verb set, and control. The effects of set upon perception of words ambiguous as to usage as noun or verb form were investigated, utilizing a factorial design. Main effects of set and form class were not statistically significant. Their interaction, however, reached significance at the 0.05 level. As predicted, tachistoscopic thresholds were lower for set-compatible words. Implications of these findings for perceptual integration vs. response bias explanations of the word frequency-threshold effect and for the psycholinguistic nature of grammatical form-class are discussed.

Cross-cultural componential analysis on affect attribution of emotion terms

One concern of studies of emotions is that of the underlying denotative components of the meanings of emotional terms, whether people are actually cognizant of them or not. In this study, we evaluated the characteristics of 10 emotional denotative components and their hierarchical ordering in attribution to 22 emotion concepts across 23 different human societies. Empirically, a quantitative model, developed by Tzeng and Osgood (1976), was used to link the relationship between affect measures of the emotion concepts and their characteristics on denotative components. It was found that the 10 denotative components functioned extremely well in predicting the affect for individual cultures and also for the 23 cultures as a whole. Cross-cultural comparisons revealed some significant differences among the components in predicting indigenous affect attributions for different cultures. Finally, the nature and dynamics of such intercultural differences were discussed in reference to the issue of independence between affect and cognition.