Linguistic Distributional Knowledge and Sensorimotor Grounding both Contribute to Semantic Category Production

The human conceptual system comprises simulated information of sensorimotor experience and linguistic distributional information of how words are used in language. Moreover, the linguistic shortcut hypothesis predicts that people will use computationally cheaper linguistic distributional information where it is sufficient to inform a task response. In a pre-registered category production study, we asked participants to verbally name members of concrete and abstract categories and tested whether performance could be predicted by a novel measure of sensorimotor similarity (based on an 11-dimensional representation of sensorimotor strength) and linguistic proximity (based on word co-occurrence derived from a large corpus). As predicted, both measures predicted the order and frequency of category production but, critically, linguistic proximity had an effect above and beyond sensorimotor similarity. A follow-up study using typicality ratings as an additional predictor found that typicality was often the strongest predictor of category production variables, but it did not subsume sensorimotor and linguistic effects. Finally, we created a novel, fully grounded computational model of conceptual activation during category production, which best approximated typical human performance when conceptual activation was allowed to spread indirectly between concepts, and when candidate category members came from both sensorimotor and linguistic distributional representations. Critically, model performance was indistinguishable from typical human performance. Results support the linguistic shortcut hypothesis in semantic processing and provide strong evidence that both linguistic and grounded representations are inherent to the functioning of the conceptual system. All materials, data, and code are available at https://osf.io/vaq56/ .     

基于语义网络的创造性认知机制研究现状与展望

语义网络是主要的知识表征方式之一,对创造性研究具有重要意义。近年来不断发展的网络科学方法为相关研究提供了强大的方法论框架及量化工具,研究者得以分别从语义网络结构及语义相关认知操作的角度探讨语义网络与创造性的内在联系。已有证据表明语义网络中所储存的概念越丰富、概念间的连接通路越多元化或越灵活,则个体创造性水平越高;而个体创造性水平亦受制于个体对概念的检索、抑制、选择、整合及扩展等认知能力。在此方向上,未来研究工作应当更多地思考如何在一个相对整合的认知框架中深入探讨语义网络结构及相关认知过程对创造性的交互作用,并结合神经影像等技术手段,将语义网络之于创造性的认知机制嵌套于神经科学体系中进行解释。     

Age-Specific Effects of Lexical–Semantic Networks on Word Production

The lexical–semantic organization of the mental lexicon is bound to change across the lifespan. Nevertheless, the effects of lexical–semantic factors on word processing are usually based on studies enrolling young adult cohorts. The current study aims to investigate to what extent age-specific semantic organization predicts performance in referential word production over the lifespan, from school-age children to older adults. In Study 1, we conducted a free semantic association task with participants from six age-groups (ranging from 10 to 80 years old) to compute measures that capture age-specific properties of the mental lexicon across the lifespan. These measures relate to lifespan changes in the Available Richness of the mental lexicon and in the lexical–semantic Network Prototypicality of concrete words. In Study 2, we used the collected data to predict performance in a picture-naming task on a new group of participants within the same age-groups as for Study 1. The results show that age-specific semantic Available Richness and Network Prototypicality affect word production speed while the semantic variables collected only in young adults do not. A richer and more prototypical semantic network across subjects from a given age-group is associated with faster word production speed. The current results indicate that age-specific semantic organization is crucial to predict lexical–semantic behaviors across the lifespan. Similarly, these results also provide cues to the understanding of the lexical–semantic properties of the mental lexicon and to lexical selection in referential tasks.     

Socially emotional brain-inspired cognitive architecture framework for artificial intelligence

Artificial Intelligence of the next generation needs to interact with users socially, convincing them in its ability to understand human minds, including emotions. For this to happen, an artificial emotional intelligence is needed, capable of adequate, believable behavior in social emotional interactions. Building on previous developments, the present work extends the general framework of emotional Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architecture (eBICA: Samsonovich, 2013, 2018), endowing it with fluents describing, in addition to appraisals, somatic markers, feelings, emotions, moods, emotional reactions and biases. Key building blocks that integrate them are moral schemas and semantic maps. The model describes interaction of three factors: plans and commitments, moral and ethical values, and somatic comfort. Learning in this framework includes self-organization of semantic maps that in turn may provide guidance for active humanlike learning. Implications for empirical studies and practical applications are discussed together with the expected impact.     

Semantic similarity and grammatical class in naming actions

Italian speakers were asked to name pictures of actions (e.g. "bere", to drink). Pictures were presented at the same time as distracter words that were semantically related or unrelated to the picture names, and were of the same or different grammatical class (verbs or nouns). Half of the participants named the actions as verbs in citation form, the other half as verbs inflected for third person singular or plural. We found a reliable semantic interference effect. Crucially, we also observed a significant interaction between naming context and grammatical class: naming latencies were slower for verb distracters in the inflected form condition, but not in the citation form condition. The results are taken to provide evidence for the separability of semantics and grammatical class.     

The relation between children's reading comprehension level and their comprehension of idioms

We report an investigation of 9-year-olds' ability to interpret idioms in relation to their reading comprehension level. We manipulated whether the idioms were transparent or opaque, whether they were real or novel, whether they were presented in isolation or in a supportive narrative context. As predicted, children were better able to explain the meanings of idioms in context than in isolation. The good and poor comprehenders did not differ in their abilities to interpret transparent idioms in context, but the poor comprehenders were significantly worse at using context to work out the meanings of opaque idioms. The explanation task revealed the source of information used by the children to derive nontarget interpretations. We discuss these findings in relation to idiom processing strategies and Levorato and Cacciari's global elaboration model.     

Category specificity in normal episodic learning: applications to object recognition and category-specific agnosia

Studies of patients with category-specific agnosia (CSA) have given rise to multiple theories of object recognition, most of which assume the existence of a stable, abstract semantic memory system. We applied an episodic view of memory to questions raised by CSA in a series of studies examining normal observers' recall of newly learned attributes of familiar objects. Subjects first learned to associate arbitrarily assigned colors or textures to objects in a training phase, and then attempted to report the newly learned attribute of each object in a recall task. Our subjects' pattern of recall errors was similar both quantitatively and qualitatively to the identification deficits among patients with CSA for biological objects. Furthermore, errors tended to reflect conceptually and structurally based confusions. We suggest that object identification involves recruitment and integration of information across distributed episodic memories and that this process is susceptible to interference from objects that are structurally similar and conceptually related.     

Semantic gender assignment regularities in German

Gender assignment relates to a native speaker's knowledge of the structure of the gender system of his/her language, allowing the speaker to select the appropriate gender for each noun. Whereas categorical assignment rules and exceptional gender assignment are well investigated, assignment regularities, i.e., tendencies in the gender distribution identified within the vocabulary of a language, are still controversial. The present study is an empirical contribution trying to shed light on the gender assignment system native German speakers have at their disposal. Participants presented with a category (e.g., predator) and a pair of gender-marked pseudo-words (e.g., der Trelle vs. die Stisse) preferentially selected the pseudo-word preceded by the gender-marked determiner "associated" with the category (e.g., masculine). This finding suggests that semantic regularities might be part of the gender assignment system of native speakers.     

The impact of semantic transparency of morphologically complex words on picture naming

We examined the contribution of semantic similarity to morphological priming effects, using the immediate (Exp. 1 and 3) and the delayed variant (Exp. 2) of picture-word interference. Distractor words were either compounds morphologically related to the picture name, but differing with respect to their semantic transparency (hummingbird, jailbird (Exp. 1); butterfly, butter dish (Exp. 3)), or form-related non-compound words (e.g., trombone). All three experiments revealed strong facilitation of picture naming due to morphologically related distractors. Form-related distractors facilitated picture naming in the immediate variant only, and to a lesser degree than compounds. Interestingly, the size of the morphemic effect was almost identical for semantically transparent and opaque complex words, which suggests that they share morphemic representations. These results suggest that morphological complexity in speech production is coded at the level of form representations, independent of semantic transparency.     

The unification of mind: Integration of hemispheric semantic processing

Seventy-six participants performed a visual half-field lexical decision task at two different stimulus onset asynchronies (50 or 750 ms). Word targets were primed either by a highly associated word (e.g., CLEAN-DIRTY), a weakly associated word (e.g., CLEAN-TIDY), or an unrelated word (e.g., CLEAN-FAMILY) projected to either the same or opposite visual field (VF) as the target. In the short SOA, RVF-left hemisphere primes resulted in high associate priming regardless of target location (ipsilateral or contralateral to the prime) whereas LVF-right hemisphere primes produced both high and low associate priming across both target location conditions. In the long SOA condition, contralateral priming patterns converged, demonstrating only high associate priming in both VF locations. The results of this study demonstrate the critical role of interhemispheric transfer in semantic processing and indicate a need to elaborate current models of semantic processing.