Mark Seidenberg
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Psychology, Faculty Member
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Semantic features have provided insight into numerous behavioral phenomena concerning concepts, categorization, and semantic memory in adults, children, and neuropsychological populations. Numerous theories and models in these areas are... more
Semantic features have provided insight into numerous behavioral phenomena concerning concepts, categorization, and semantic memory in adults, children, and neuropsychological populations. Numerous theories and models in these areas are based on representations and computations involving semantic features. Consequently, empirically derived semantic feature production norms have played, and continue to play, a highly useful role in these domains. This article describes a set of feature norms collected from approximately 725 participants for 541 living (dog) and nonliving (chair) basic-level concepts, the largest such set of norms developed to date. This article describes the norms and numerous statistics associated with them. Our aim is to make these norms available to facilitate other research, while obviating the need to repeat the labor-intensive methods involved in collecting and analyzing such norms. The full set of norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Phonetics, Semantics, Reading, and 4 moreMemory, Humans, Verbal behavior, and Adult
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... See Dick RAN: Rapid Naming and the Longitudinal Prediction of Reading Subskills in First and Second Graders ... Page 3. RAPID NAMING AND READING 131 ...
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We employed brain-behavior analyses to explore the relationship between performance on tasks measuring phonological awareness, pseudoword decoding, and rapid auditory processing (all predictors of reading (dis)ability) and brain... more
We employed brain-behavior analyses to explore the relationship between performance on tasks measuring phonological awareness, pseudoword decoding, and rapid auditory processing (all predictors of reading (dis)ability) and brain organization for print and speech in beginning readers. For print-related activation, we observed a shared set of skill-correlated regions, including left hemisphere temporoparietal and occipitotemporal sites, as well as inferior frontal, visual, visual attention, and subcortical components. For speech-related activation, shared variance among reading skill measures was most prominently correlated with activation in left hemisphere inferior frontal gyrus and precuneus. Implications for brain-based models of literacy acquisition are discussed.
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Research Interests: Semantics, Psycholinguistics, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Reading, Language, and 16 moreConcepts, Prefrontal Cortex, Word order, Brain Mapping, Right Hemisphere Functions, Brain, Humans, Female, Neuroimage, Male, Reaction Time, Young Adult, Mental processes, Semantic Processing, Semantic representation, and Psychomotor Performance
The role of sensory-motor systems in conceptual understanding has been controversial. It has been proposed that many abstract concepts are understood metaphorically through concrete sensory-motor domains such as actions. Using fMRI, we... more
The role of sensory-motor systems in conceptual understanding has been controversial. It has been proposed that many abstract concepts are understood metaphorically through concrete sensory-motor domains such as actions. Using fMRI, we compared neural responses with literal action (Lit; The daughter grasped the flowers), metaphoric action (Met; The public grasped the idea), and abstract (Abs; The public understood the idea) sentences of varying familiarity. Both Lit and Met sentences activated the left anterior inferior parietal lobule, an area involved in action planning, with Met sentences also activating a homologous area in the right hemisphere, relative to Abs sentences. Both Met and Abs sentences activated the left superior temporal regions associated with abstract language. Importantly, activation in primary motor and biological motion perception regions was inversely correlated with Lit and Met familiarity. These results support the view that the understanding of metaphoric action retains a link to sensory-motor systems involved in action performance. However, the involvement of sensory-motor systems in metaphor understanding changes through a gradual abstraction process whereby relatively detailed simulations are used for understanding unfamiliar metaphors, and these simulations become less detailed and involve only secondary motor regions as familiarity increases. Consistent with these data, we propose that anterior inferior parietal lobule serves as an interface between sensory-motor and conceptual systems and plays an important role in both domains. The similarity of abstract and metaphoric sentences in the activation of left superior temporal regions suggests that action metaphor understanding is not completely based on sensory-motor simulations but relies also on abstract lexical-semantic codes.
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Reading, Metaphor, and 25 moreLexical Semantics, Face recognition (Psychology), Cognitive Neuroscience, Adolescent, Brain Mapping, Right Hemisphere Functions, Humans, Judgment, Cerebral Cortex, Concept Formation, Female, Male, Reaction Time, Young Adult, Biological Motion, Action Plan, Motor System, Conceptual Understanding, Oxygen, Adult, Inferior Parietal Lobule, Neurosciences, Motor activity, Statistics as Topic, and Neuropsychological Tests
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Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Visual perception, Speech perception, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Language, and 19 moreVisual Cortex, Brain Mapping, Temporal Lobe, Humans, Sentence Comprehension, Cerebral Cortex, Movement, Female, Male, Verbal behavior, Arm, Young Adult, Middle Aged, Cerebral, Adult, Neurosciences, Frontal Lobe, Functional Laterality, and Psychomotor Performance
The formation of the past tense of verbs in English has been the focus of the debate concerning connectionist vs. symbolic accounts of language. Brain-injured patients differ with respect to whether they are more impaired in generating... more
The formation of the past tense of verbs in English has been the focus of the debate concerning connectionist vs. symbolic accounts of language. Brain-injured patients differ with respect to whether they are more impaired in generating irregular past tenses (TAKE-TOOK) or past tenses for nonce verbs (WUG-WUGGED). Such dissociations have been taken as evidence for distinct "rule" and "associative" memory systems in morphology and against the connectionist approach in which a single system is used for all forms. We describe a simulation model in which these impairments arise from damage to phonological or semantic information, which have different effects on generalization and irregular forms, respectively. The results provide an account of the bases of impairments in verb morphology and show that these impairments can be explained within connectionist models that do not use rules or a separate mechanism for exceptions.
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Phonology, Phonetics, Speech perception, and 16 moreMorphology, Comparative Study, Dyslexia, Language Impairment, Language disorders, Learning Disabilities, Speech, Humans, Child, Language Skills, Word Recognition, Comparative Analysis, Awareness, Longitudinal Studies, Nino, and Severity of Illness Index
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Are words read visually (by means of a direct mapping from orthography to semantics) or phonologically (by mapping from orthography to phonology to semantics)? The authors addressed this long-standing debate by examining how a large-scale... more
Are words read visually (by means of a direct mapping from orthography to semantics) or phonologically (by mapping from orthography to phonology to semantics)? The authors addressed this long-standing debate by examining how a large-scale computational model based on connectionist principles would solve the problem and comparing the model's performance to people's. In contrast to previous models, the present model uses an architecture in which meanings are jointly determined by the 2 components, with the division of labor between them affected by the nature of the mappings between codes. The model is consistent with a variety of behavioral phenomena, including the results of studies of homophones and pseudohomophones thought to support other theories, and illustrates how efficient processing can be achieved using multiple simultaneous constraints.