Lexical representation of fact and opinion

This research investigated the lexical properties underlying comprehension that a word represents fact or opinion. In Experiment 1 subjects reliably identified words as either fact or opinion. Bivariate correlations and multiple regression showed that fact/opinion judgments were predicted primarily by ratings of the ease of verifiability of a word's referent and secondarily by the word's literalness, but not by several other lexical attributes: abstractness-concreteness, vagueness-preciseness, and evaluation. Experiment 2 extended the results of the first experiment to an implicit fact/opinion judgment, i.e., the identification of headlines as originating from a newspaper's front page (presumably based primarily upon fact) or from the editorial page (presumably based upon opinion). The headline judgments, also made reliably by subjects, were predicted by the same variables found significant in the first experiment, i.e., by verifiability and literalness, but not by the other lexical properties. Thus, the results of both experiments indicate that the identification of a word as representing fact or opinion is rooted in a word's verifiability and literalness.