The Dynamics of Semantic Processing

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Language is a uniquely human capacity, and one that is essential to our mental and social lives. Despite its importance, we do not yet have a complete cognitive or neural explanation for key aspects of language. In the proposed research I focus on one such aspect: When you encounter a word, how does its meaning come to mind? Word meaning retrieval is a key component process in reading, listening, and other skills that involve language understanding. My long-term goal is to explain semantic processing, the fundamental process by which word meanings are retrieved. My short-term goal is to test the viability of the various theoretical accounts that have been proposed by investigating children's and adults' semantic processing behaviour and associated neural activity for both concrete and abstract words. I will shed new light on semantic processing by capitalizing on two facts: a) there is variability in the meaning or semantic information associated with different words, and b) there are behavioural and neural consequences of this variability. Words vary in the richness of their meanings, and one can define semantic richness as a function of many different conceptualizations of semantics. For instance, by studying the effects of words' sensorimotor richness we can test semantic frameworks that propose that sensorimotor information is an essential aspect of how we represent and retrieve word meanings. Such frameworks show promise in explaining how we understand the meanings of concrete words, like truck, that can be experienced through the senses, but they struggle to explain how we understand the meanings of more abstract words, like truth. Much of the previous research has tended to focus on processing of concrete nouns, yet these words represent less than half of our vocabulary. Explaining how more abstract meanings (abstract nouns, verbs) are acquired and represented is a challenge for most of the leading semantic theories and one that will be tackled in the proposed research. The proposed work will utilize a range of tasks and procedures, including well-established paradigms (e.g., lexical and semantic decision tasks, EEG) as well as emerging and innovative methods (e.g., the megastudy approach, gesture capture and priming), to investigate important new questions about how we derive meaning from language. The studies involve both child and adult participants because any complete theory of semantic processing needs to explain both acquisition and retrieval of word meanings. Further, in developmental studies we can test predictions derived from different semantic theories, examining how acquisition of word meanings varies as a function of age, sensorimotor experience, cognitive development, and other factors. This research will allow us to develop a complete account of semantic processing, helping to advance the field towards an explanation of the human language capacity.