Vonk Jet M J, Obler Loraine K, Jonkers Roel
Department of Neurology, Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain, Columbia University Medical Center, 622 W 168th St, New York, NY, 10032-3784, USA.
Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, New York, NY, USA.
J Psycholinguist Res. 2019 Jun;48(3):601-615. doi: 10.1007/s10936-018-9621-4.
Effects of concreteness and grammatical class on lexical-semantic processing are well-documented, but the role of sensory-perceptual and sensory-motor features of concepts in underlying mechanisms producing these effects is relatively unknown. We hypothesized that processing dissimilarities in accuracy and response time performance in nouns versus verbs, concrete versus abstract words, and their interaction can be explained by differences in semantic weight-the combined amount of sensory-perceptual and sensory-motor information to conceptual representations-across those grammatical and semantic categories. We assessed performance on concrete and abstract subcategories of nouns and verbs with a semantic similarity judgment task. Results showed that when main effects of concreteness and grammatical class were analyzed in more detail, the grammatical-class effect, in which nouns are processed more accurately and quicker than verbs, was only present for concrete words, not for their abstract counterparts. Moreover, the concreteness effect, measured at different levels of abstract words, was present for both nouns and verbs, but it was less pronounced for verbs. The results do not support the grammatical-class hypothesis, in which nouns and verbs are separately organized, and instead provide evidence in favor of a unitary semantic space, in which lexical-semantic processing is influenced by the beneficial effect of sensory-perceptual and sensory-motor information of concepts.
具体性和语法类别对词汇语义加工的影响已有充分记录，但概念的感觉知觉和感觉运动特征在产生这些影响的潜在机制中的作用相对未知。我们假设，名词与动词、具体词与抽象词在准确性和反应时间表现上的加工差异，以及它们之间的相互作用，可以通过语义权重的差异来解释，语义权重是指跨这些语法和语义类别的概念表征中感觉知觉和感觉运动信息的综合量。我们用语义相似性判断任务评估了名词和动词的具体和抽象子类别的表现。结果表明，当更详细地分析具体性和语法类别的主效应时，名词比动词加工得更准确、更快的语法类别效应，仅出现在具体词中，而不出现在其抽象对应词中。此外，在不同抽象程度的词上测量的具体性效应，在名词和动词中都存在，但在动词中不太明显。结果不支持名词和动词是分别组织的语法类别假设，而是为单一语义空间提供了证据，在这个空间中，词汇语义加工受到概念的感觉知觉和感觉运动信息的有益影响。
