BLIND: a set of semantic feature norms from the congenitally blind

Lenci, Alessandro; Baroni, Marco; Cazzolli, Giulia; Marotta, Giovanna

doi:10.3758/s13428-013-0323-4

Cited by 49 publications

(44 citation statements)

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“…Semantic feature effects reported in the literature include the following: a semantic priming effect (concepts that share semantic features prime one another, as opposed to concepts that do not share semantic features; Cree et al, 1999;McRae & Boisvert, 1998), a number of features effect (decision times and errors in lexical decision tasks are lower for concepts with many features; Pexman et al, 2002;Pexman et al, 2003), and a distinctive features effect (pairs of concepts sharing distinctive features are judged to be more similar than concepts sharing an equal number of relatively frequent features (Mirman & Magnuson, 2009). Because of their acknowledged importance in cognitive processing, semantic feature norms have been collected throughout the years for different languages (see, e.g., Kremer & Baroni, 2011, for Italian and German;Montefinese et al, 2013, for Italian) and different varieties of language (see, e.g., BLIND, a corpus of semantic features norms produced by congenitally blind participants: Lenci et al, 2013).…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Reliability in content analysis: The case of semantic feature norms classification

2016

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Semantic feature norms (e.g., STIMULUS: car → RESPONSE: ) are commonly used in cognitive psychology to look into salient aspects of given concepts. Semantic features are typically collected in experimental settings and then manually annotated by the researchers into feature types (e.g., perceptual features, taxonomic features, etc.) by means of content analyses-that is, by using taxonomies of feature types and having independent coders perform the annotation task. However, the ways in which such content analyses are typically performed and reported are not consistent across the literature. This constitutes a serious methodological problem that might undermine the theoretical claims based on such annotations. In this study, we first offer a review of some of the released datasets of annotated semantic feature norms and the related taxonomies used for content analysis. We then provide theoretical and methodological insights in relation to the content analysis methodology. Finally, we apply content analysis to a new dataset of semantic features and show how the method should be applied in order to deliver reliable annotations and replicable coding schemes. We tackle the following issues: (1) taxonomy structure, (2) the description of categories, (3) coder training, and (4) sustainability of the coding scheme-that is, comparison of the annotations provided by trained versus novice coders. The outcomes of the project are threefold: We provide methodological guidelines for semantic feature classification; we provide a revised and adapted taxonomy that can (arguably) be applied to both concrete and abstract concepts; and we provide a dataset of annotated semantic feature norms.

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Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Cohen's k = .94 Lenci et al (2013) 19 categories, inspired by WB (2009) and (Lebani and Pianta 2010a) Concrete nouns 100 Two independent coders annotated the sample of concept-feature pairs…”

Section: Concrete Nouns 730mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reliability in content analysis: The case of semantic feature norms classification

2016

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“…Young blind children distinguish between different acts of seeing, understanding that one can "look" without "seeing" (5). Blind and sighted adults generate similar features for visual words and judge the same visual verbs to be semantically similar (6,7). For example, sighted and blind adults alike distinguish among acts of visual perception along dimensions of duration and intensity (e.g., staring is intense and prolonged, whereas peeking is brief) and among light emission events along dimensions of periodicity and intensity (e.g., flash is intense and periodic, whereas glow is low intensity and stable) (7).…”

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confidence: 99%

Knowledge of animal appearance among sighted and blind adults

Kim

Elli

2019

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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How does first-person sensory experience contribute to knowledge? Contrary to the suppositions of early empiricist philosophers, people who are born blind know about phenomena that cannot be perceived directly, such as color and light. Exactly what is learned and how remains an open question. We compared knowledge of animal appearance across congenitally blind (n = 20) and sighted individuals (two groups, n = 20 and n = 35) using a battery of tasks, including ordering (size and height), sorting (shape, skin texture, and color), odd-one-out (shape), and feature choice (texture). On all tested dimensions apart from color, sighted and blind individuals showed substantial albeit imperfect agreement, suggesting that linguistic communication and visual perception convey partially redundant appearance information. To test the hypothesis that blind individuals learn about appearance primarily by remembering sighted people's descriptions of what they see (e.g., "elephants are gray"), we measured verbalizability of animal shape, texture, and color in the sighted. Contrary to the learn-from-description hypothesis, blind and sighted groups disagreed most about the appearance dimension that was easiest for sighted people to verbalize: color. Analysis of disagreement patterns across all tasks suggest that blind individuals infer physical features from non-appearance properties of animals such as folk taxonomy and habitat (e.g., bats are textured like mammals but shaped like birds). These findings suggest that in the absence of sensory access, structured appearance knowledge is acquired through inference from ontological kind. blindness | vision | language | animals

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“…In recent years, norms in some other languages have appeared: in Italian (Kremer & Baroni, 2011;Lenci et al, 2013;Montefinese, Ambrosini, Fairfield, & Mammarella 2013), German (Kremer & Baroni, 2011), and Dutch (Ruts et al, 2004). However, as far as we know, the feature production norms we are presenting here are the first ones for Spanish speakers.…”

Section: Existing Normsmentioning

confidence: 87%

“…For example, Devereux, Tyler, Geertzen, and Randall (2014) collected data for 638 concepts, thus extending the number of concepts selected by McRae and colleagues and including features that were produced by at least two participants (in McRae et al's, 2005, norms, the production frequency of a feature instead had to be greater than or equal to five for that feature to be included). Other recent norms have been collected by Lenci et al (2013), who included both blind and sighted participants. These norms comprise nouns and verbs and offer an interesting comparison between groups.…”

Section: Existing Normsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spanish semantic feature production norms for 400 concrete concepts

Vivas

Comesaña

et al. 2016

Behav Res

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Semantic feature production norms provide many quantitative measures of different feature and concept variables that are necessary to solve some debates surrounding the nature of the organization, both normal and pathological, of semantic memory. Despite the current existence of norms for different languages, there are still no published norms in Spanish. This article presents a new set of norms collected from 810 participants for 400 living and nonliving concepts among Spanish speakers. These norms consist of empirical collections of features that participants used to describe the concepts. Four files were elaborated: a concept-feature file, a concept-concept matrix, a feature-feature matrix, and a significantly correlated features file. We expect that these norms will be useful for researchers in the fields of experimental psychology, neuropsychology, and psycholinguistics.

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BLIND: a set of semantic feature norms from the congenitally blind

Cited by 49 publications

References 45 publications

Reliability in content analysis: The case of semantic feature norms classification

Reliability in content analysis: The case of semantic feature norms classification

Knowledge of animal appearance among sighted and blind adults

Spanish semantic feature production norms for 400 concrete concepts

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