Co-activation of Taxonomic and Thematic Relations in Spoken Word Comprehension: Evidence From Eye Movements.

Pingping Xu,Qingqing Qu,Wei Shen,Xingshan Li

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00964

Abstract

Evidence from behavior, computational linguistics, and neuroscience studies supported that semantic knowledge is represented in (at least) two semantic systems (i.e., taxonomic and thematic systems). It remains unclear whether, and to what extent taxonomic and thematic relations are co-activated. The present study investigated the co-activation of the two types of semantic representations when both types of semantic relations are simultaneously presented. In a visual-world task, participants listened to a spoken target word and looked at a visual display consisted of a taxonomic competitor, a thematic competitor and two distractors. Growth curve analyses revealed that both taxonomic and thematic competitors attracted visual attention during the processing of the target word but taxonomic competitor received more looks than thematic competitor. Moreover, although fixations on taxonomic competitor rose faster than thematic competitor, these two types of competitors started to attract more fixations than distractor in a similar time window. These findings indicate that taxonomic and thematic relations are co-activated by the spoken word, the activation of taxonomic relation is stronger and rise faster than thematic relation.

Highlights

The structure and organization of semantic knowledge are critical to most aspects of human cognition such as object recognition, memory and language processing
Evidence from behavior, computational linguistics, and neuroscience studies supported that semantic knowledge is represented in two semantic systems: a taxonomic system in which semantic knowledge is organized based on categories that are defined by shared semantic features such as fruit (e.g., Collins and Loftus, 1975), and a thematic system with the organization of semantic information based on events or scenarios such as objects involved in building a house (e.g., Estes et al, 2011)
The present study examined the semantic representations invoked by a spoken word when the referent object was absent in the visual scene

Summary

Introduction

The structure and organization of semantic knowledge are critical to most aspects of human cognition such as object recognition, memory and language processing. In a picture-word interference task in which semantic relations between picture names and distractor words were manipulated, de Zubicaray et al (2013) demonstrated that taxonomic similarity between picture names and distractor words inhibited picture naming whereas thematic relation facilitated picture naming. These findings indicate that taxonomic and thematic semantic relations are functionally distinct

Methods

Results

Conclusion