The semantic structure of vision verbs: A psycholinguistic investigation of Italian

The aim of the present study was to investigate the semantic dimensions that contribute to the mental representation of vision verbs in Italian. In Experiment 1, a group of experts (psychology faculty members) was asked to list the semantic attributes necessary for describing a set of Italian vision verbs (Phase 1) and a group of students rated the extent to which each of these attributes was appropriate to characterise these verbs (Phase 2). In Experiment 2, the conceptual organisation of vision verbs was assessed through Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) using direct judgements of pairwise similarity between vision verbs (e.g., “vedere-guardare”). The results show that six of the attributes generated in Phase 1 are useful for describing the pattern of similarity ratings obtained in Experiment 2, namely attention, certainty, cognitive content, control, duration, and intentionality.