The Development of SILEK:

Psychology of Lexicon
Setiawati Intan Savitri & Suci Nirmala, Mercubuana University
Language Represent Us
Introduction

 In everyday life we use words to represent our identity, social

relations, where we come from, who we are, our social-economic
status, etc.
 Words and language, then become important things for
psychology and everyday communication.
 Language is a medium that can be used by cognitive, personality,
clinical, industrial, and social psychologists to understand humans.
Interest of Psychologist to Language

 The interest of experts in the field of psychology related to verbal expression through this
language even emerged since FREUD (1901) delivered the concept of SLIP OF THE
TONGUE which states that one's hidden intentions
 ROSARCH (1921) created projective tests to uncover one's thoughts, intentions,
motivations from their meanings to the ambiguous form of Rosarch's ink, followed by
Murray who created a Thematic Aperseption Test (TAT) to see someone's needs,
affiliations, achievement, and power
 From the viewpoint of language acquisition and behavioral theory, states that language
is mastered by small children quickly and relatively easily with reinforcement techniques.
This theory criticized by Chomsky (1965), who stated that biologically the mastery
mechanism of language was determined biologically. After that, the discourse and
dialectice of those theory, keep on until now (Fernandez & Cairns, 2011),
In terms of psycholinguistics

 Psychologist and psycholinguistic try to understand about the impact of

language towards human cognition or vice versa. At the end of the 1940s the
theory of Sapir-Whorf was quite popular, which suggested that speakers of
various languages thought differently.
 Later, scientists criticised the theory, which led to a belief that language
acquisition and language theory were universal.
 Then special attention has been directed at the question of whether people who
speak differently also think differently.
 Boroditsky, L. (2011) which then shows that the language used by people can
influence their way of thinking in such a way that language can condition
individual perceptions of a problem and its actions.
Technology development to see how
natural language use related to human’s mind

These various theories in the fields of cognitive

psychology and psycholinguistic then attract
experts in the field of linguistics and computers to
examine language with the help of computers to
see how grammar, lexicon, and even phonology
are related to one's mental processes and
cognition,
Traditional approach to verbatim /
unstructured text data

 Coding the verbatim manually

 Preparing and do thematic analysis manually
 These processes need: 1) more time, 2) need more coder 3) need more caution
4) coslty
 According to these issue, since 1969 scientist in the field of psychology already
developt Freudian Analysis Content Method, till 1989 James Pannebaker & his
Colleague, developing LIWC
 Nvivo is popular software, that used for qualitative thematic analysis
 But those analysis using word for unit analysis, but not spesific pattern sentence
LIWC vs NVIVO => SILEK
No LIWC NVIVO

1. Derived from the need of psychological Derived from the need of structuring qualitative
or psycholingustic knowledge research data

2. + Have internal Dictionaries, wich is
correspond to psychological construct
and linguistic construct,
-Do not have internal dictionaries, the user could
use N-Vivo customizely, depend of their purpose
of study, but it means a lot of work to defined
the psychological construct by them self
+have sentiment analysis but the user have to
input the neg/post word them-self

3. - The dictionaries, is not translate yet in +customized language

bahasa Indonesia, so we can not use it
recently
4. +Quantitave approach to count the +Quantitative approach to count the word and
word theme
The Development of SILEK

 Derived from the need to find a self distancing pattern sentence.

 Self Distancing (Kross, 2016) is a psychological tool (perspective, language use:
pronouns) to promote an adaptive self reflection about traumatic event. The
grand theory of this psychological construct is psychological distance
(Liberman,Troope,Stephen, 2007) , that have 4 aspek of distance: social distance,
spatial distance, temporal distance, & hipotetical distance)
 Kross (2016) found that human have possibility to reflect adaptively depend on
they perspective to their experience, and have a distant perspective is facilitated
by how their language used. Such as how they use pronouns ( in self talk
research eg. I could do it vs you could do it). Using “you” to motivate our-self is
more adaptive then using “i”
The Development of SILEK

 The questions is: In English they have reflexive words such as: myself,
mine, me, that the function is to put an “I” as a subject to be an
object. but in Indonesia, we don’t have any reflective word, so i
assume we need another tools to have distance perspective
instead of using different pronouns only
 We’re then running an experiment, that combine pronouns use
and we need a tools to find sentence reflective pattern from they
essay streams , namely SILEK
What SILEK Capable of : from raw essay
streams to code essay
What Silek Capable of: categorizing word
in a linguistic terms
What Silek Capable of: categorizing word
in a psychological terms
Hope

We hope that audience will give us a profound

feedback,
Thank u
Contact us: intan.savitri@mercubuana.ac.id
0812-875-11143