Differences In Semantic Feature Production Between Healthy Older and Young Adults

VIVAS, L; GARCÍA CONI, A.; MARTINEZ, S.; COMESAÑA, A.; PICCOLO, B.; VIVAS, J.

Chicago

Congreso; AAIC>18 Alzheimer's Association International Conference; 2018

Alzheimer's Association

The processes tapped by the widely-used word association (WA) paradigm remain amatter of debate: while some authors consider them as driven by lexical cooccurrences,others emphasize the role of meaning-based connections. To test these contrastive hypotheses, we analyzed responses in a WA task in terms of their normative defining features (those describing the object denoted by the cue word). Results indicate that 72.5% of the responses had medium-to-high coincidence with such defining semantic features. Moreover, 75.51% of responses had medium-to-high values of Relevance (a measure of the importance of the feature for construing a given concept). Furthermore, most responses (62.7%) referred to elements of the situation in which the concept usually appears, followed by sensory properties (e.g., color) of the denoted object (27,86%). These results suggest that the processes behind WA tasks involve a reactivation of the cue item´s semantic properties, particularly those most relevant to its core meaning.