The breakdown of semantic knowledge: insights from a statistical model of meaning representation.
Investigations of patients with semantic category-specific deficits have revealed a wide range of performance and variability in categories that are impaired or spared; this variability presents a challenge to accounts of category specificity. Accounts based only on impairment to semantic features of a particular type (e.g., visual), as well as accounts based only on featural properties (e.g., feature intercorrelations), are insufficient to explain the variability of patients' performance. A first goal of the paper is to discuss how a hybrid account incorporating both a level of organization according to feature types (a level of nonlinguistic conceptual representations) and a level of organization dictated by featural properties may provide a more comprehensive account of the cases reported in the literature. The second and most novel goal of the study reported here is to derive from our hybrid account a series of novel predictions concerning the representation and impairment of a different domain of knowledge: knowledge of actions and events, a domain of knowledge that has received remarkably little attention to date.
Vinson
David P
DP
Department of Psychology, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AP, UK. d.vinson@ucl.ac.uk
Vigliocco
Gabriella
G
Cappa
Stefano
S
Siri
Simona
S
D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D015233:Models, Statistical; D012660:Semantics