Semantic dicrimination of verbal signs, pictographs, and pictographic components
Abstract
A series of four experiments applied the semantic differential technique to the measurement of the meaning of various public information pictographs. In Experiment 1, the methodological approach was validated and it was demonstrated that a meaningful semantic space could be derived for pictographic signs. Discriminant analysis was applied to statistically distinguish the stimuli from one another. The accuracy of classifying subjects' responses was considerably above chance.
In Experiment 2, the number of stimuli was increased to include a set of verbal translations ( printed signs) and two sets of pictographic components which were derived from the set of pictographs. The set of scales used in Experiment 1 was refined and reduced to a smaller number in Experiment 2. This set of scales produced a semantic space similar to that found in Experiment 1. Responses to pictographs, verbal messages, and most pictographic components were correctly classified with above chance accuracy. More importantly, it was shown that Classification analysis between sets of stimuli allowed an evaluation of the degree to which pictographic stimuli were perceived as sharing common meaning with their intended verbal translations ( e.g., responses to pictographs could be predicted from the responses to their verbal equivalents and vice versa) and the meaning which individual components of the pictographs carried.
The third experiment confirmed these results with independent groups of subjects responding to different sets of stimuli. Experiment 3 also allowed potential artifactual effects, such as response bias ( e.g., preferences for left versus right side of the scale) , and stimulus sequencing to be ruled out as influences on the results. Finally, Experiment 4 used the same procedure as Experiment 3 and, provided a general confirmation of the results using a new set of stimuli. The semantic differential technique was demonstrated to be a valid method for the determination of the degree to which pictographic signs succeed in transmitting an intended message. The advantage of this approach and the possible applications of this technique, as well as the need for further research, are discussed.
Description
Bibliography: p. 152-155.
Keywords
Citation
Caron, J. (1978). Semantic dicrimination of verbal signs, pictographs, and pictographic components (Master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada. Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/20311