The architecture supporting our conceptual knowledge of abstract words has rem ained almost entirely unexplored. By contrast, a vast neuropsychological, neurol inguistic and neuroimaging literature has addressed quest...The architecture supporting our conceptual knowledge of abstract words has rem ained almost entirely unexplored. By contrast, a vast neuropsychological, neurol inguistic and neuroimaging literature has addressed questions relating to the st ructure of the semantic system underpinning our knowledge of concrete items (e.g . artefacts and animals). In the context of semantic refractory access dysphasia , a series of experiments exploring and comparing abstract and concrete word com prehesion are described. We demonstrate that semantically associated abstract wo rds reliably interfere with one another significantly more than semantically syn onymous abstract words,while concrete words show the reverse pattern. We report the first evidence that abstract and concrete word meanings are based in represe ntational systems that have qualitatively different properties. More specificall y, we show that abstract concepts, but not concrete concepts, are represented in an associative neural network. Furthermore, our patient was found to have signi ficantly greater difficulty in identifying high frequency than low frequency abs tract words. This observation constitutes the first evidence of an inverse word frequency effect.Our results challenge the generality of many existing models of human conceptual knowledge, which derive their structure from experimental find ings in the concrete domain alone.展开更多
文摘The architecture supporting our conceptual knowledge of abstract words has rem ained almost entirely unexplored. By contrast, a vast neuropsychological, neurol inguistic and neuroimaging literature has addressed questions relating to the st ructure of the semantic system underpinning our knowledge of concrete items (e.g . artefacts and animals). In the context of semantic refractory access dysphasia , a series of experiments exploring and comparing abstract and concrete word com prehesion are described. We demonstrate that semantically associated abstract wo rds reliably interfere with one another significantly more than semantically syn onymous abstract words,while concrete words show the reverse pattern. We report the first evidence that abstract and concrete word meanings are based in represe ntational systems that have qualitatively different properties. More specificall y, we show that abstract concepts, but not concrete concepts, are represented in an associative neural network. Furthermore, our patient was found to have signi ficantly greater difficulty in identifying high frequency than low frequency abs tract words. This observation constitutes the first evidence of an inverse word frequency effect.Our results challenge the generality of many existing models of human conceptual knowledge, which derive their structure from experimental find ings in the concrete domain alone.
