[2] As People Understand Word Meanings, What Do They Think About?

Background

Experiential approaches to semantics suggest that people understand word meanings by drawing on their own sensory, motor, emotional, and social experiences. Autistic traits occur on a continuum in the general population and are linked to differences in how people pay attention, process information, and respond to the world. Previous findings show that individuals with higher autistic traits often focus more on sensory and motor details and pay less attention to social and emotional information. However, it is still unclear whether these differences affect how people mentally represent the meanings of everyday words. This study aims to fill this gap by measuring how adults with different levels of autistic traits rate the experiential features of common words.

Research Questions / Hypotheses

The study examines whether adults with higher and lower autistic traits differ in how strongly they link everyday words to different types of experiences. The key prediction is that people with higher autistic traits will give higher ratings on sensory and motor features and lower ratings on social and emotional features when judging word meanings.

Participants

A total of 83 REP participants completed the online study. Participants who show unreliable or invalid response patterns will be excluded from the final analyses.

Methods

Participants first completed a short demographic survey. They then completed the main word-rating task, where they rated 20 common English nouns on 65 experiential features using a 7-point scale. After the rating task, they filled out the 50-item Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ). All tasks were completed online through Qualtrics.

Results

Group differences in experiential ratings will be examined using multilevel linear models, with ratings predicted by autistic-trait group while accounting for random variation across participants and words. Fixed-effect estimates and their confidence intervals will be used to assess the strength and direction of group differences. Model outputs will be used to rank experiential features according to their sensitivity to autistic-trait variations. It is expected that the high-trait group will show stronger ratings on sensory-motor features and weaker ratings on social-emotional features.

Implications

If the multilevel models show that autistic-trait groups differ in how they weight sensory-motor, emotional, and social features when interpreting word meanings, this would indicate that semantic representations vary systematically across individuals. Stronger sensory-motor ratings in the high-trait group would support experiential theories suggesting that perceptual and action-related systems play a primary role in meaning construction. Conversely, lower social-emotional ratings would align with cognitive accounts proposing reduced reliance on socially grounded information among people with elevated autistic traits.In applied contexts, the results may inform communication strategies or educational practices that accommodate diverse ways of processing word meaning. The findings will be prepared for submission to a peer-reviewed journal in cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, or autism research.