The effects of representativeness and concreteness on the "guessability" of Blissymbols
Authors:
William S. Yovetich; Theresa A. Young
DOI:
10.1080/07434618812331274587
Publication Frequency:
4 issues per year
Published in:
Augmentative and Alternative Communication,
Volume
4,
Issue
1
March
1988
, pages 35
- 39
Subjects:
Communication Disorders;
Neurological Rehabilitation;
Formats available:
PDF
(English)
View Article:
View Article (PDF)
Abstract
Twenty student volunteers, naive to Blissymbols, were asked to “guess” the meaning of 64 Blissymbols, each presented without their word gloss. The symbols and their verbal labels were each varied orthogonally on two dimensions of representativeness of the symbol (high/low) and concreteness of the word they were designed to represent (high/low). The representativeness values were obtained from the norms reported by Yovetich and Paivio (1980), while the concreteness values were obtained from the norms reported by the Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968). The subjects' responses were subsequently scored as either “exact/synonymous” or “other.” Results of the analysis of subjects' mean responses for the two dimensions of Blissymbols, using paired f-tests, revealed that the guessability of a symbol's gloss was significantly affected by the dimension of representativeness. The results have implications for understanding the psychological attributes of the graphic representations which are used in clinical and/or research methodologies, and they support the findings of earlier research dealing with Blissymbols as well as natural language logographs (i.e., Chinese and Japanese).
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| Keywords: aided symbols; Blissymbols; concreteness; guessability; representativeness |
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