Abstract
In this experiment, an attempt was made to measure the quantitative aspects of the meaning of some English nouns learned by Japanese middle school students, and to compare those meaning with the meanings of the same English words obtained by Jenkins and others (1958) by the same method on a group of American college students. As the measuring instrument, Osgood's Semantic Differential, which in this experiment consists of 25 seven-point polar adjectives, was used for the Japanese students to rate two sets of 40 different nouns, one set written in English and the other in Japanese.
The rating of the total 30 subjects (15 males and 15 females) for each of 13 different English nouns and 10 Japanese nouns were put into the final analysis. The analysis was carried out first in terms of the individual words, and, secondly, in terms of the semantic structures formulated, by means of Thurstone's Complete Centroid method, from the two sets of inter-correlations of 10 English nouns obtained from the Japanese and American students.
The results revealed (a) that the meanings of the English nouns held by the Japanese students bear more similarity to the meanings of the Japanese equivalents than the meanings of the same English nouns reported by Jenkins and others, and (b) that, compared on the basis of the semantic structures obtained, marked differences were found in the meanings of most English nouns held by the Japanese students and that held by American students.
Definitions of meanings and the possible outcomes expected from this kind of experiments were discussed in details.
