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MEASURING THE MEANING OF FINANCIAL STATEMENT TERMINOLOGY: A PSYCHOLINGUISTICS APPROACH
Author(s) -
Adelberg Arthur H.,
Farrelly Gail E.
Publication year - 1989
Publication title -
accounting and finance
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.645
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1467-629X
pISSN - 0810-5391
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-629x.1989.tb00154.x
Subject(s) - meaning (existential) , terminology , accounting , loan , psycholinguistics , shareholder , psychology , certification , association (psychology) , field (mathematics) , linguistics , business , finance , political science , cognition , law , corporate governance , philosophy , neuroscience , psychotherapist , mathematics , pure mathematics
Measuring the meaning of communication between and among producers (certified public accountants, academic accountants, and private accountants) and users (chartered financial analysts, commercial bank loan officers, and shareholders) of financial statements is the purpose of this study. Two psycholinguistic techniques, classification analysis and association analysis, were used in a field experiment to measure the intergroup and intragroup transference of denotative (objective) and connotative (subjective) meaning, respectively. The study concluded that we are somewhere in between the “worst” and the “best” on a communication continuum. The evidence indicated only one communication problem — a problem involving the transfer of connotative (subjective) meaning on an intergroup basis, that is, between producers and users.