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September 2014 - present
September 2012 - September 2014
Publications
Publications (94)
Tulving characterized semantic memory as a vast repository of meaning that underlies language and many other cognitive processes. This perspective on lexical and conceptual knowledge galvanized a new era of research undertaken by numerous fields, each with their own idiosyncratic methods and terminology. For example, “concept” has different meaning...
Reading, naming, and repetition are classical neuropsychological tasks widely used in the clinic and psycholinguistic research. While reading and repetition can be accomplished by following a direct or an indirect route, pictures can be named only by means of semantic mediation. By means of fMRI multivariate pattern analysis, we evaluated whether t...
Distinctive aspects of a culture are often reflected in the meaning and usage of words in the language spoken by bearers of that culture. Keywords such as душа (soul) in Russian, hati (heart) in Indonesian and Malay, and gezellig (convivial/cosy/fun) in Dutch are held to be especially culturally revealing, and scholars have identified a number of s...
To explain how the human brain represents and organizes meaning, many theoretical and computational language models have been proposed over the years, varying in their underlying computational principles and in the language samples based on which they are built. However, how well they capture the neural encoding of lexical semantics remains elusive...
Conceptual associations influence how human memory is structured: Cognitive research indicates that similar concepts tend to be recalled one after another. Semantic network accounts provide a useful tool to understand how related concepts are retrieved from memory. However, most current network approaches use pairwise links to represent memory reca...
Most words have a variety of senses that can be added, removed, or altered over time. Understanding how they change across different contexts and time periods is crucial for revealing the role of language in social and cultural evolution. In this study we aimed to explore the collective changes in the mental lexicon as a consequence of the COVID-19...
A great majority of people around the world know more than one language. So, how does knowing one language affect the learning and use of additional languages? The question of cross-language influences is the focus of this book. Do bilinguals hear, understand, and produce language and meaning differently because of the languages they speak? How wel...
Semantic networks provide a useful tool to understand how related concepts are retrieved from memory. However, most current network approaches use pairwise links to represent memory recall patterns. Pairwise connections neglect higher-order associations, i.e. relationships between more than two concepts at a time. These higher-order interactions mi...
Large-scale word association datasets are both important tools used in psycholinguistics and used as models that capture meaning when considered as semantic networks. Here, we present word association norms for Rioplatense Spanish, a variant spoken in Argentina and Uruguay. The norms were derived through a large-scale crowd-sourced continued word a...
Word valence is one of the principal dimensions in the organization of word meaning. Co-occurrence based similarities calculated by predictive Natural Language Processing models are relatively poor at representing affective content, but very powerful in their own way. Here, we determined how these two canonical but distinct ways of representing wor...
Semantic gender norms are presented for 24,037 Dutch words. Eighty participants rated 6,017 words each on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from feminine to masculine. Each word was rated by 10 male and 10 female participants. The collected norms show high reliability and correlate well with similar norms in English. We show that semantic gender is di...
Semantic gender norms are presented for 24,037 Dutch words. Eighty participants rated 6,017 words each on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from feminine to masculine. Each word was rated by 10 male and 10 female participants. The collected norms show high reliability and correlate well with similar norms in English. We show that semantic gender is di...
Emotions are not necessarily universal across different languages and cultures. Mental lexicons of emotions depend strongly on contextual factors, such as language and culture. The Chinese language has unique linguistic properties that are different from other languages. As a main variant of Chinese, Cantonese has some emotional expressions that ar...
Background and Hypothesis
The underpinnings of language deviations in psychotic symptoms (e.g., formal thought disorder, delusions) remains unclear. We examined whether the semantic networks underlying word associations are useful predictors of clinical outcomes in psychosis.
Study Design
Fifty-one patients with schizophrenia and other psychotic d...
We report data from a proof-of-concept study involving the concurrent assessment of large-scale individual semantic networks and cognitive performance. The data include10,800 free associations—collected using a dedicated web-based platform over the course of several weeks—and responses to several cognitive tasks, including verbal fluency, episodic...
People undergo many idiosyncratic experiences throughout their lives that may contribute to individual differences in the size and structure of their knowledge representations. Ultimately, these can have important implications for individuals' cognitive performance. We review evidence that suggests a relationship between individual experiences, the...
Conscious processing of word meaning can be guided by attention. In this event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study in 22 healthy young volunteers, we examined in which regions orienting attention to two fundamental and generic dimensions of word meaning, concreteness versus valence, alters the semantic representations coded in activ...
Some aspects of psychiatrization can be understood as forms of concept creep, the progressive expansion of concepts of harm. This article compares the two concepts and explores how concept creep sheds light on psychiatrization. We argue that although psychiatrization is in some respects a broader concept than concept creep, addressing institutional...
An essential aspect of human communication is the ability to access and retrieve information from ones’ ‘mental lexicon’. This lexical access activates phonological and semantic components of concepts, yet the question whether and how these two components relate to each other remains widely debated. We harness tools from network science to construc...
We report data from a proof-of-concept study involving the concurrent assessment of large-scale individual semantic networks and cognitive performance. The data include 10,800 free associations-collected using a dedicated web-based platform over the course of 2-4 weeks-and responses to several cognitive tasks, including verbal fluency, episodic mem...
People undergo many idiosyncratic experiences throughout their lives that may contribute to individual differences in the size and structure of their knowledge representations. Ultimately, these can have important implications for individuals' cognitive performance. We review evidence that suggests a relationship between individual experiences, the...
One of the main limitations of natural language‐based approaches to meaning is that they do not incorporate multimodal representations the way humans do. In this study, we evaluate how well different kinds of models account for people's representations of both concrete and abstract concepts. The models we compare include unimodal distributional lin...
Background
Language Disorganisation is central to the conceptualization of psychosis. Disruptions in semantic processing have been observed both as a “state”, and a “trait” phenomena in psychotic disorders. Quantification of semantic abnormalities have been improved with recent advances in semantic modeling. The current study applied such computati...
The COVID-19 pandemic forced countries all over the world to take unprecedented measures like nationwide lockdowns. To adequately understand the emotional and social repercussions, a large-scale reconstruction of how people perceived these unexpected events is necessary but currently missing. We address this gap through social media by introducing...
The COVID-19 pandemic forced countries all over the world to take unprecedented measures like nationwide lockdowns. To adequately understand the emotional and social repercussions, a large-scale reconstruction of how people perceived these unexpected events is necessary but currently missing. We address this gap through social media by introducing...
The examination of semantic cognition has traditionally identified word concreteness as well as valence as two of the principal dimensions in the representation of conceptual knowledge. More recently, corpus-based vector space models as well as graph-theoretical analysis of large-scale task-related behavioural responses have revolutionized our insi...
Semantic property listing tasks require participants to generate short propositions (e.g., \({<}{} barks {>}\), \({<}{} has\,\, fur {>}\)) for a specific concept (e.g., DOG). This task is the cornerstone of the creation of semantic property norms which are essential for modeling, stimuli creation, and understanding similarity between concepts. Desp...
The research of the word is still very much the research of the noun. Adjectives have been largely overlooked, despite being the second-largest word class in many languages and serving an important communicative function, because of the rich, nuanced qualifications they afford. Adjectives are also ideally suited to study the interface between cogni...
Word associations have been used widely in psychology, but the validity of their application strongly depends on the number of cues included in the study and the extent to which they probe all associations known by an individual. In this work, we address both issues by introducing a new English word association dataset. We describe the collection o...
Similarity plays an important role in organizing the semantic system. However, given that similarity cannot be defined on purely logical grounds, it is important to understand how people perceive similarities between different entities. Despite this, the vast majority of studies focus on measuring similarity between very closely related items. When...
In contrast to noun categories, little is known about the graded structure of adjective categories. In this study, we investigated whether adjective categories show a similar graded structure and what determines this structure. The results show that adjective categories like nouns exhibit a reliable graded structure. Similar to nouns, we investigat...
In this article, we describe the most extensive set of word associations collected to date. The database contains over 12,000 cue words for which more than 70,000 participants generated three responses in a multiple-response free association task. The goal of this study was (1) to create a semantic network that covers a large part of the human lexi...
Semantic property listing tasks require participants to generate short propositions (e.g., \<*barks*\>, \<*has fur*\>) for a specific concept (e.g., dog). This task is the cornerstone of the creation of semantic property norms which are essential for modelling, stimuli creation, and understanding similarity between concepts. However, despite the wi...
The field of cognitive aging has seen considerable advances in describing the linguistic and semantic changes that happen during the adult life span to uncover the structure of the mental lexicon (i.e., the mental repository of lexical and conceptual representations). Nevertheless, there is still debate concerning the sources of these changes, incl...
The field of cognitive aging has seen considerable advances in describing the linguistic and semantic changes that happen during the adult life span to uncover the structure of the mental lexicon (i.e., the mental repository of lexical and conceptual representations). Nevertheless, there is still debate concerning the sources of these changes, incl...
The boundaries of our understanding of conceptual representation in the brain have been redrawn since the introduction of explicit models of semantics. These models are grounded in vast behavioural datasets acquired in healthy volunteers. Here, we review the most important techniques which have been applied to detect semantic information in neuroim...
The field of cognitive aging has seen considerable advances in describing the linguistic and semantic changes that happen during the adult life span to uncover the structure of the mental lexicon (i.e., the mental repository of lexical and conceptual representations). Nevertheless, there is still debate concerning the sources of these changes, incl...
Knowledge of visual and nonvisual attributes of concrete entities is distributed over neocortical uni- and polymodal association cortex. Here we investigated the role of left perirhinal cortex in explicit knowledge retrieval from written words. We examined whether it extended across visual and nonvisual properties, animate and inanimate entities, h...
One of the main limitations in natural language-based approaches to meaning is that they are not grounded. In this study, we evaluate how well different kinds of models account for people’s representations of both concrete and abstract concepts. The models are both unimodal (language-based only) models and multimodal distributional semantic models...
In two studies we compare a distributional semantic model derived from word co-occurrences and a word association based model in their ability to predict properties that affect lexical process-ing. We focus on age of acquisition, concreteness, and three affective variables, namely valence, arousal, and dominance, since all these variables have been...
Word associations have been used widely in psychology, but the validity of their application strongly depends on the number of cues included in the study and the extent to which they probe all associations known by an individual. In this work, we address both issues by introducing a new English word association dataset. We describe the collection o...
According to a recent study, semantic similarity between concrete entities correlates with the similarity of activity patterns in left middle IPS during category naming. We examined the replicability of this effect under passive viewing conditions, the potential role of visuoperceptual similarity, where the effect is situated compared to regions th...
To represent the meaning of a word, most models use external language resources, such as text corpora, to derive the distributional properties of word usage. In this study, we propose that internal language models, that are more closely aligned to the mental representations of words, can be used to derive new theoretical questions regarding the str...
We investigate how the mental lexicon changes over the life span using free association data from over 8,000 individuals, ranging from 10 to 84 years of age, with more than 400 cue words per age group. Using network analysis, with words as nodes and edges defined by the strength of shared associations, we find that associative networks evolve in a...
Background: Disturbance of association is a hallmark feature of schizophrenia (Bleuler, 1911). The mechanism under the disturbance and how it relates to psychopathology are, however, yet to be understood. Using new methods of network analysis, the current study aims to explore the relationship between network measures and symptoms in schizophrenia...
The mental lexicon contains the knowledge about words acquired over a lifetime. A central question is how this knowledge is structured and changes over time. Here we propose to represent this lexicon as a network consisting of nodes that correspond to words and links reflecting associative relations between two nodes, based on free association data...
Similarity plays an important role in organizing the semantic system. However, given that similarity cannot be defined on purely logical grounds, it is important to understand how people perceive similarities between different entities. Despite this, the vast majority of studies focus on measuring similarity between very closely related items. When...
Semantic networks are often used to represent the meaning of a word in the mental lexicon. To construct a large-scale network for this lexicon, text corpora provide a convenient and rich resource. In this chapter the network properties of a text-based approach are evaluated and compared with a more direct way of assessing the mental content of the...
Word ratings on affective dimensions are an important tool in psycholinguistic research. Traditionally, they are obtained by asking participants to rate words on each dimension, a time-consuming procedure. As such, there has been some interest in computationally generating norms, by extrapolating words' affective ratings using their semantic simila...
For statistical analysis of event related potentials (ERPs), there are convincing arguments against averaging across stimuli or subjects. Multivariate filters can be used to isolate an ERP component of interest without the averaging procedure. However, we would like to have certainty that the output of the filter accurately represents the component...
Words are characterized by a variety of lexical and psychological properties, such as their part of speech, word-frequency, concreteness, or affectivity. In this study, we examine how these properties relate to a word's connectivity in the mental lexicon, the structure containing a person's knowledge of words. In particular, we examine the extent t...
Left perirhinal cortex has been previously implicated in associative coding. According to a recent experiment, the similarity of perirhinal fMRI response patterns to written concrete words is higher for words which are more similar in their meaning. If left perirhinal cortex functions as an amodal semantic hub, one would predict that this semantic...
The present research examines the nature of the different processes that have been proposed to underlie semantic priming. Specifically, it has been argued that priming arises as a result of automatic target activation and/or the use of strategies like prospective expectancy generation and retrospective semantic matching. This article investigates t...
We investigated the critical contribution of right ventral occipitotemporal cortex to knowledge of visual and functional-associative attributes of biological and non-biological entities and how this relates to category-specificity during confrontation naming. In a consecutive series of 7 patients with lesions confined to right ventral occipitotempo...
The present research investigates semantic priming with an adapted version of the word fragment completion task. In this task, which we refer to as the speeded word fragment completion task, participants need to complete words such as lett_ce (lettuce), from which one letter was omitted, as quickly as possible. This paradigm has some interesting qu...
The N400 is an event-related potential (ERP) that reflects the processing of semantics in the brain. When reading sentences, the N400 amplitude is modulated by both the cloze probability of
the sentence and the
association strength between individual words. When contradicted in strongly constraining sentences, that is, the beginning of the sentence...
Word processing studies increasingly make use of regression analyses based on large numbers of stimuli (the so-called megastudy approach) rather than experimental designs based on small factorial designs. This requires the availability of word features for many words. Following similar studies in English, we present and validate ratings of age of a...
One of the most significant recent advances in the study of semantic processing is the advent of models based on text and other corpora. In this study, we address what impact both the quantitative and qualitative properties of corpora have on mental representations derived from them. More precisely, we evaluate models with different linguistic and...
Three studies tested the idea that people’s cultural worlds are structured in ways that promote and highlight emotions and emotional responses that are beneficial in achieving central goals in their culture. Based on the idea that U.S. Americans strive for competitive individualism, while (Dutch-speaking) Belgians favor a more egalitarian variant o...
How verbal and nonverbal visuoperceptual input connects to semantic knowledge is a core question in visual and cognitive neuroscience, with significant clinical ramifications. In an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment we determined how cosine similarity between fMRI response patterns to concrete words and pictures...
We previously reported the neuropsychological consequences of a lesion confined to the middle and posterior part of the right fusiform gyrus (case JA) causing a partial loss of knowledge of visual attributes of concrete entities in the absence of category-selectivity (animate versus inanimate). We interpreted this in the context of a two-step model...
A contrast category effect on categorization occurs when the decision to apply a category term to an entity not only involves a comparison between the entity and the target category but is also influenced by a comparison of the entity with 1 or more alternative categories from the same domain as the target. Establishing a contrast category effect o...