Semantic Memory Organization in Children and Young Adults (original) (raw)
Related papers
International Journal of Behavioral Development, 2003
Children aged between 5 and 10 years old were tested on a semantic fluency (freelisting) task for two categories: animals and body parts. Additive tree analysis (Sattath & Tversky, 1977) was used to clusters items based upon both their proximity in the generated lists and their frequency of co-occurrence; the resulting trees together with production frequency data were compared across three age groups. For the animals category, this analysis revealed that although older children named proportionally more non-mammals, at all ages children tend to cluster animals according to their environmental context. For body parts, the analysis showed more parts, particularly internal organs, named with age and a cluster of face parts generated by all age groups. A novel feature of the current research was the use of statistical measures of additive tree similarity. The results are discussed with respect to theories of developmental change in the organization of conceptual memory, and are viewed as supporting an assumption of continuity with age in the use of schematic relations in category structure. Insights are drawn from connectionist modeling to help explain the persistence, throughout childhood, of early forms of memory organization.
The organization of conceptual knowledge: the evidence from category-specific semantic deficits
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2003
Questions for Future Research † Do category-specific semantic deficits for non-living things fractionate into more fine-grained deficits when large numbers of well controlled stimuli are used? † Are there category-specific deficits restricted to modality-specific input (e.g. visual/structural descriptions) or modality-specific output (e.g. lexical phonological or lexical orthographic) representations? † Do category-specific patterns of activation in inferior temporal areas reflect the activation of modality-specific input representations (i.e. visual/structural descriptions) or conceptual knowledge about the visual properties of objects?
2000
We present a new account of the fine-grained structure of semantic categories derived from neuropsychological, behavioral, and developmental data. The account places theoretical emphasis on the functions of the referents of concepts. We claim (i) that the distinctiveness of functional features correlated with perceptual features varies across semantic domains; and (ii) that category structure emerges from the complex interaction of these variables.
The Categorical Organization of Semantic and Lexical Knowledge in the Brain
Behavioural Neurology, 1990
In recent years several papers have shown that different verbal and non-verbal semantic categories can be selectively disrupted by brain damage and that consistent anatomical localizations correspond to each category-specific semantic disorder. This paper aims to suggest that the brain regions typically damaged in a given type of category-specific semantic disorder might be critically involved in processing the kind of information which mainly contributes to organizing that semantic category and to distinguishing among its members. This general hypothesis is discussed taking into account: (a) comprehension and production of object names (nouns) and of action names (verbs) in agrammatic and in anomic aphasic patients; (b) verbal and non-verbal identification of body parts; (c) verbal and non-verbal identification of living beings and of man made artefacts.
Concepts and Categories: A Cognitive Neuropsychological Perspective
Annual Review of Psychology, 2009
One of the most provocative and exciting issues in cognitive science is how neural specificity for semantic categories of common objects arises in the functional architecture of the brain. More than two decades of research on the neuropsychological phenomenon of category-specific semantic deficits has generated detailed claims about the organization and representation of conceptual knowledge. More recently, researchers have sought to test hypotheses developed on the basis of neuropsychological evidence with functional imaging. From those two fields, the empirical generalization emerges that object domain and sensory modality jointly constrain the organization of knowledge in the brain. At the same time, research within the embodied cognition framework has highlighted the need to articulate how information is communicated between the sensory and motor systems, and processes that represent and generalize abstract information. Those developments point toward a new approach for understanding category specificity in terms of the coordinated influences of diverse regions and cognitive systems.
Rapid, experience-related changes in the organization of children’s semantic knowledge
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
The organization of knowledge according to relations between concepts is crucially important for many cognitive processes, and its emergence during childhood is a key focus of cognitive development research. Prior evidence about the role of learning and experience in the development of knowledge organization primarily comes from studies investigating differences between preexisting, naturally-occurring groups (such as children from rural vs. urban settings, or children who own a pet vs. children who don't), and a handful of studies on the effects of researcherdeveloped educational interventions. However, we know little about whether knowledge organization can be relatively rapidly molded by shorter-term real-world learning experiences (e.g., on a timescale of days vs. years or months). The present study investigated whether naturalistic learning experiences can drive rapid, measurable changes in knowledge organization in children by investigating the effects of a week-long Zoo summer camp (compared to a control school-based camp) on the degree to which 4-to 9-year-old children's knowledge about animals was organized according to taxonomic relations. Although there were no differences in taxonomic organization between the Zoo and the school-based camp at pre-test, only children who participated in the Zoo camp showed increases in taxonomic organization at post-test. Moreover, analyses of changes in taxonomic organization in Zoo camp children suggested that these changes were primarily driven by improvements in the degree to which children differentiated between taxonomic categories. These findings provide novel evidence that naturalistic experiences can drive rapid changes in knowledge organization.
Brain and Cognition, 2009
Conceptual knowledge of our world is represented in semantic memory in terms of concepts and semantic relations between concepts. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the cortical regions underlying the processing of sequential and taxonomic relations. Participants were presented verbal cues and performed three tasks: (1) a sequential relation judgement task judging the sequential relation between two script events, (2) a taxonomic relation judgement task judging the taxonomic relation between two objects, and (3) a grammatical judgement task (control condition) judging whether a presented word was a verb or a noun. We hypothesized that the processing of sequential and taxonomic relations were supported by dissociable cortical regions. The results showed that both semantic relation types activated large-scale neural networks including the left inferior and middle frontal gyrus. The activation in left inferior frontal gyrus correlated with higher processing demands during the sequential relation condition. The processing of sequential relations additionally activated left medial and middle frontal gyrus, whereas the processing of taxonomic relations activated the left superior temporal gyrus and posterior cingulate.
Wernicke (1900( , as cited in G. H. Eggert, 1977 suggested that semantic knowledge arises from the interaction of perceptual representations of objects and words. The authors present a parallel distributed processing implementation of this theory, in which semantic representations emerge from mechanisms that acquire the mappings between visual representations of objects and their verbal descriptions. To test the theory, they trained the model to associate names, verbal descriptions, and visual representations of objects. When its inputs and outputs are constructed to capture aspects of structure apparent in attribute-norming experiments, the model provides an intuitive account of semantic task performance. The authors then used the model to understand the structure of impaired performance in patients with selective and progressive impairments of conceptual knowledge. Data from 4 well-known semantic tasks revealed consistent patterns that find a ready explanation in the model. The relationship between the model and related theories of semantic representation is discussed.