Prototypicality, distinctiveness, and intercorrelation: Analyses of the semantic attributes of living and nonliving concepts

Abstract

Many cognitive psychological, computational, and neuropsychological approaches to the organisation of semantic memory have incorporated the idea that concepts are, at least partly, represented in terms of their fine-grained features. We asked 20 normal volunteers to provide properties of 64 concrete items, drawn from living and nonliving categories, by completing simple sentence stems (e.g., an owl is __, has __, can__). At a later date, the same participants rated the same concepts for prototypicality and familiarity. The features generated were classified as to type of knowledge (sensory, functional, or encyclopaedic), and also quantified with regard to both dominance (the number of participants specifying that property for that concept) and distinctiveness (the proportion of exemplars within a conceptual category of which that feature was considered characteristic). The results demonstrate that rated prototypicality is related to both the familiarity of the concept and its distance from the average of the exemplars within the same category (the category centroid). The feature database was also used to replicate, resolve, and extend a variety of previous observations on the structure of semantic representations. Specifically, the results of our analyses (1) resolve two conflicting claims regarding the relative ratio of sensory to other kinds of attributes in living vs. nonliving concepts; (2) offer new information regarding the types of features-across different domains-that distinguish concepts from their category coordinates; and (3) corroborate some previous claims of higher intercorrelations between features of living things than those of artefacts.

A set of semantic norms for German and Italian

“…The English concept words were mainly taken from those used by McRae et al (2005) and Garrard et al (2001) in their experiments. They were chosen so that their translations into the target languages German and Italian had unambiguous and reasonably monosemic lexical realisations.…”

“…However, only a few research groups made the norms they collected publicly available (Garrard et al, 2001;McRae et al, 2005;Vinson & Vigliocco, 2008). The data produced by participants are published along with statistical data from analyses regarding psycholinguistic variables including, e.g., familiarity, typicality, and production frequency, which are augmented by measures requiring additional sources, such as occurrence frequencies from text corpora and association strength based on these frequencies.…”

“…Wu and Barsalou (2009) used feature norms for the comparison of predictions of a theory involving perceptual symbol systems and one based on amodal semantics. Garrard, Lambon Ralph, Hodges, and Patterson (2001) investigated categoryspecific semantic deficits, using their norms. Vinson and Vigliocco (2002) used a collection of norms to compare nouns versus verbs in a series of experimental paradigms.…”

An investigation of a relative impairment in naming non-living items: theoretical and methodological implications

“…Thus, PH's naming appears to be influenced by whether the target is living or non-living and by whether items are operative with generally better performance on items rated as 'discrete, separable from context, manipulable, firm to the touch and available to several sensory modalities'. Finally, preliminary investigations showed a relationship between naming and the number of features produced by controls (Garrard, Lambon Ralph, Hodges, & Patterson, 2001) 4 .…”

Models of relevant cue integration in name retrieval

“…Degradation of conceptual knowledge follows the severity of the disease (Garrard, Lambon Ralph, Hodges, & Patterson, 2001) and it is the contention of Gainotti, Silveri, Daniele, and Giustolisi (1995) that DAT causes widespread damage to the temporal lobes and consequently impairment of semantic knowledge. An interesting issue is the difference between DAT patients and controls in terms of the binding mechanism underlying naming to description.…”