Measuring Meaning: Word Meaning and Meaning Change

Abstract Understanding how people use and understand words, and how what a word is taken to mean changes over time, are fundamental to political, scientific and cultural discourse. Despite decades of theorising about meaning across myriad disciplines, a major impediment to progress has been the lack of a means of measuring meaning on a moment-by-moment basis. Here we present a novel method for measuring meaning over short time scales using spatial language as a critical test case. Across three large-scale between-participant experiments (N = 1,191) we show that people select between a small number of ‘fixed’ meanings on a trial-by-trial basis rather than exhibiting creativity and flexibility in meaning construction. Moreover, what words are taken to mean at a given moment in time is affected by what they have been taken to mean immediately before, even when the situational context of use changes, consistent with dynamic systems approaches to meaning.