Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T16:09:30.727Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - The semantic representation of nouns and verbs

from Part IV - Representations of Nouns and Verbs vs. Objects and Actions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 September 2009

By
Kevin Shapiro ,
Argye E. Hillis  and
Alfonso Caramazza
Edited by
John Hart  and
Michael A. Kraut
Kevin Shapiro
Affiliation:
Harvard University; Harvard Medical School
Argye E. Hillis
Affiliation:
Johns Hopkins University
Alfonso Caramazza
Affiliation:
Harvard University
John Hart
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Dallas
Michael A. Kraut
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Get access

Summary

That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 2

Introduction

What's in a name? For cognitive science, the question is more than rhetorical. Rather, it gets to the heart of what we know – and do not know – about how words are stored and retrieved by the human brain, and there are several competing ideas about how it should be approached. The question becomes even more complex when one considers that not all words are names, or nouns; a complete theory of lexical semantics should also account for the meaning of verbs, adjectives, and other so-called “content” words, associated with what many have argued are fundamentally different types of concepts (O'Grady, 1997). Where can we begin?

Sensory/functional approaches

One school of thought holds that there are roughly two kinds of semantic knowledge associated with the lexical entry for any given word. On the one hand, there is information that derives directly from the senses, including features representing an object's smell, color, size, and propensity to have sharp thorns. On the other hand, there is everything else – for example, the same item's monetary and sentimental value, where it can typically be found, and whether it is suitable for consumption as jam. The latter sort of information is often (somewhat imprecisely) called “associative” or “functional.” Accordingly, this method of partitioning the lexicon has been called the sensory/functional theory (SFT) of semantic knowledge.

Keywords

extended sensory/functional theoryfunctional MRIlanguage productionneurobiologysensory/functional theorysemantic structure
Type
Chapter
Information
Neural Basis of Semantic Memory , pp. 205 - 216
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bak, T. H., et al. (2001). Selective impairment of verb processing associated with pathological changes in Brodmann areas 44 and 45 in the motor neurone disease–dementia–aphasia syndrome. Brain, 124(Pt. 1): 103–20.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Berndt, R. S., Haendiges, A. N., and Burton, M. W. (2002). Grammatical class and imageability in aphasic word production: their effects are independent. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 15(3–5): 353–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bird, H., Howard, D., and Franklin, S. (2000). Why is a verb like an inanimate object? Grammatical category and semantic category deficits. Brain & Language, 72(3): 246–309.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Caramazza, A. (1994). Parallels and divergences in the acquisition and dissolution of language. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 346(1315): 121–7.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Caramazza, A. and Hillis, A. E. (1991). Lexical organization of nouns and verbs in the brain. Nature, 349: 788–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caramazza, A. and Mahon, B. Z. (2003). The organization of conceptual knowledge: the evidence from category-specific semantic deficits. Trends in Cognitive Science, 7(8): 354–61.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Damasio, A. R. and Tranel, D. (1993). Nouns and verbs are retrieved with differently distributed neural systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 90(11): 4957–60.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Daniele, A., et al. (1994). Evidence for a possible neuroanatomical basis for lexical processing of nouns and verbs. Neuropsychologia, 32(11): 1325–41.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gorno-Tempini, M. L., et al. (2004). Cognition and anatomy in three variants of primary progressive aphasia. Annals of Neurology, 55(3): 335–46.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hillis, A. E., et al. (2003). Neural regions essential for writing verbs. Nature Neuroscience, 6(1): 19–20.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hillis, A. E., Oh, S., and Ken, L. (2004). Deterioration of naming nouns versus verbs in primary progressive aphasia. Annals of Neurology, 55: 268–75.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hillis, A. E., Tuffiash, E., and Caramazza, A. (2002). Modality-specific deterioration in naming verbs in nonfluent primary progressive aphasia. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14(7): 1099–108.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hillis, A. E., Heidler-Gary, J., Newhart, M., Chang, S., Ken, L., Bak, T. (2006). Naming and comprehension in primary progressive aphasia: the influence of grammatical word class. Aphasiology, 20, 246–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kable, J. W., Lease-Spellmeyer, J., and Chatterjee, A. (2002). Neural substrates of action event knowledge. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14(5): 795–805.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kemmerer, D. (2000). Grammatically relevant and grammatically irrelevant features of verb meaning can be independently impaired. Aphasiology, 14: 997–1020.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laiacona, M. and Caramazza, A. (2004). The noun/verb dissociation in language production: Varieties of causes. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 21: 103–24.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Luzzatti, C., et al. (2002). Verb–noun double dissociation in aphasic lexical impairments: the role of word frequency and imageability. Brain & Language, 81(1–3): 432–44.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marshall, J., Chiat, S., and Robson, J. (1996). Calling a salad a federation: an investigation of semantic jargon. Part 2: Verbs. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 9(4): 251–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marshall, J., Pring, T., and Chiat, S. (1996). Calling a salad a federation: an investigation of semantic jargon. Part 1: Nouns. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 9(4): 237–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCarthy, R. A. and Warrington, E. K. (1985). Category specificity in an agrammatic patient: the relative impairment of verb retrieval and comprehension. Neuropsychologia, 23(6): 709–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miceli, G., et al. (1984). On the basis for the agrammatic's difficulty in producing main verbs. Cortex, 20(2): 207–20.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Neininger, B. and Pulvermüller, F. (2003). Word-category specific deficits after lesions in the right hemisphere. Neuropsychologia, 41(1): 53–70.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
O'Grady, W. (1997). Syntactic Development. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oliveri, M., Finocchiaro, C., Shapiro, K., Gangitano, M., Caramazza, A., and Pascual-Leone, A. (2004). All talk and no action: a transcranial magnetic stimulation study of motor cortex activation during speech production. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16(3): 374–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perani, D., Cappa, S. F., Schnur, T., Tettamanti, M., Collina, S., Rosa, M. M., and Fazio, F. (1999). The neural correlates of verb and noun processing. A PET study. Brain, 122(Pt. 12): 2337–44.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pulvermüller, F. (1999). Words in the brain's language. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22(2): 253–79.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pulvermüller, F., Lutzenberger, W., and Preissl, H. (1999). Nouns and verbs in the intact brain: evidence from event-related potentials and high-frequency cortical responses. Cerebral Cortex, 9(5): 497–506.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rapp, B. and Caramazza, A. (1998). A case of selective difficulty in writing verbs. Neurocase, 4: 127–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rapp, B. and Caramazza, A. (2003). Selective difficulties with spoken nouns and written verbs: a single case study. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 15(3–5): 373–402.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shapiro, K. and Caramazza, A. (2001). Sometimes a noun is just a noun: comments on Bird, Howard, and Franklin (2000). Brain & Language, 76(2): 202–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shapiro, K. and Caramazza, A. (2003a). Grammatical processing of nouns and verbs in left frontal cortex?Neuropsychologia, 41(9): 1189–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shapiro, K. and Caramazza, A. (2003b). Looming a loom: evidence for independent access to grammatical and phonological properties in verb retrieval. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 16(2–3): 85–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shapiro, K., Shelton, J., and Caramazza, A. (2000). Grammatical class in lexical production and morphological processing: evidence from a case of fluent aphasia. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 17: 665–82.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shapiro, K. A., Moo, L. R., and Caramazza, A. (2006). Cortical signatures of noun and verb production. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 103(5): 1644–9.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shapiro, K. A., et al. (2005). Dissociating neural correlates for nouns and verbs. NeuroImage, 24: 1058–67.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tranel, D., et al. (2001). A neural basis for the retrieval of words for actions. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 18(7): 655–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tranel, D., et al. (2004). Neural correlates of conceptual knowledge for actions. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 20(3–6): 409–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warrington, E. K. and Shallice, T. (1984). Category specific semantic impairments. Brain, 107(3): 829–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Warrington, E. K. and McCarthy, R. A. (1983). Category specific access dysphasia. Brain, 106(4): 859–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Warrington, E. K. and McCarthy, R. A. (1987). Categories of knowledge. Further fractionations and an attempted integration. Brain, 110(5): 1273–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×