The semantic organization of some simple nouns and verbs

Abstract

This paper examines the semantic organization of concrete nouns and verbs and its development during childhood. Memory for semantically related nouns and verbs was compared to memory for unrelated nouns and verbs in adults and children. Greater effects of relatedness were found for nouns than for verbs at all ages. We argue that this is because concrete nouns fall into closely related and hierarchically organized domains, while verbs form a more matrix-like organization. We propose that there are two reasons for these differences in organization. First, the object categories encoded in concrete nouns are independent entities in the mental lexicon, organized chiefly in relation to each other, whereas verbs encode dependent categories with directed connections to their noun arguments. Second, verbs have many elements of meaning which cut across semantic field, e.g., manner, intention. The other major finding was the appearance of marked developmental changes. While ordered recall of semantically related lists improved with slower presentation in older subjects, recall of all list types decreased at slower rates in young children. This finding suggests that active processing is of short duration in young children. In addition, young children had great difficulty recalling verbs after interference tasks. We argue that the differences in semantic organization of concrete nouns and verbs, together with limitations in active processing in young children, can explain a variety of age-related changes in performance with verbs, including poor recall after interference tasks and the syntagmaticparadigmatic shift in free associations. There is no need to postulate developmental changes in semantic organization.