Describing the structure of concepts through different feature levels

ABSTRACT

It has been suggested that concepts can be recognised based on at least some amount of highly shared features across individuals (i.e. core features). However, the boundaries between those features and less-shared ones remain unclear. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to operationalise the different levels of the structure of a concept's meaning and to test the effect of those levels on semantic decision latencies. First, we performed a feature based cued-recall task. Then, we designed two speeded verification tasks in which features were presented before and after the concept (i.e. feature-concept and concept-feature condition, respectively). Results of the cued-recall task allowed us to operationalise core features. Furthermore, we observed that core features were verified faster than partially shared, followed by features, and partially shared features faster than idiosyncratic ones, being features, and that this effect is independent of the order of stimulus presentation.

KEYWORDS:

• Feature levels
• semantic memory
• conceptual representation
• feature norms

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We selected the measure subjective lexical frequency instead of the objective lexical frequency measure because only the former is available in the Argentine Spanish speaking population and these norms are available for the same 400 concepts that we used.

2 It is available at http://www3.fi.mdp.edu.ar/analisis/psicologia/tecnologia.zip.

3 The double mode value indicated no agreement on the feature that allowed participants to recognize the concept.

4 Responses to idiosyncratic features were not taken as mistakes as, by nature, they cannot be considered as true or false.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by UNMDP [grant number PSI 244/15] ; and ANPCyT -PICT [grant number 2015-0983].