Knowledge about word and object meanings can be organized taxonomically (fruits, mammals, etc.) based on shared features, or thematically (eating breakfast, taking a dog for a walk, etc.) based on participation in events or scenarios. An eye-tracking study showed that both kinds of knowledge are activated during comprehension of a single spoken word, even when the listener is not required to perform any active task. The results further revealed that an individual’s relative activation of taxonomic relations compared to thematic relations predicts that individual’s tendency to favor taxonomic over thematic relations when asked to choose between them in a similarity judgment task. These results argue that individuals differ in the relative strengths of their taxonomic and thematic semantic knowledge and suggest that meaning information is organized in two parallel, complementary semantic systems.

Both taxonomic and thematic semantic relations have been studied extensively in behavioral studies and there is an emerging consensus that the anterior temporal lobe plays a particularly important role in the representation and processing of taxonomic relations, but the neural basis of thematic semantics is less clear. We used eye tracking to examine incidental activation of taxonomic and thematic relations during spoken word comprehension in participants with aphasia. Three groups of participants were tested: neurologically intact control participants (N=14), individuals with aphasia resulting from lesions in left hemisphere BA 39 and surrounding temporo-parietal cortex regions (N=7), and individuals with the same degree of aphasia severity and semantic impairment and anterior left hemisphere lesions (primarily inferior frontal gyrus and anterior temporal lobe) that spared BA 39 (N=6). The posterior lesion group showed reduced and delayed activation of thematic relations, but not taxonomic relations. In contrast, the anterior lesion group exhibited longer-lasting activation of taxonomic relations and did not differ from control participants in terms of activation of thematic relations. These results suggest that taxonomic and thematic semantic knowledge are functionally and neuroanatomically distinct, with the temporo-parietal cortex playing a particularly important role in thematic semantics.

Theories of word production and word recognition generally agree that multiple word candidates are activated during processing. The facilitative and inhibitory effects of these “lexical neighbors” have been studied extensively using behavioral methods and have spurred theoretical development in psycholinguistics, but relatively little is known about the neural basis of these effects and how lesions may affect them. The present study used voxel-wise lesion overlap subtraction to examine semantic and phonological neighbor effects in spoken word production following left hemisphere stroke. Increased inhibitory effects of near semantic neighbors were associated with inferior frontal lobe lesions, suggesting impaired selection among strongly activated semantically-related candidates. Increased inhibitory effects of phonological neighbors were associated with posterior superior temporal and inferior parietal lobe lesions. In combination with previous studies, these results suggest that such lesions cause phonological-to-lexical feedback to more strongly activate phonologically-related lexical candidates. The comparison of semantic and phonological neighbor effects and how they are affected by left hemisphere lesions provides new insights into the cognitive dynamics and neural basis of phonological, semantic, and cognitive control processes in spoken word production.

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