If My Memory Serves Me Well: Investigating My Memory for the Past 24 Years.

This paper reports on a study of my autobiographical memory for 2691 notes recorded over 24 years in my diary, without any intention to ever use the notes as test material. I never read any of the notes again until the start of the memory study. I remembered less than two thirds of the recorded events and the retention curve showed a curvilinear shape.

Semantic gender: Norms for 24,000 Dutch words and its role in word meaning.

Semantic gender norms are presented for 24,037 Dutch words. Eighty participants rated 6017 words each on a five-point Likert scale ranging from feminine to masculine. Each word was rated by ten male and ten female participants.

A Comparison of the Spatial Arrangement Method and the Total-Set Pairwise Rating Method for Obtaining Similarity Data in the Conceptual Domain.

We compare two methods for obtaining similarity data in the conceptual domain. In the Spatial Arrangement Method (SpAM), participants organize stimuli on a computer screen so that the distance between stimuli represents their perceived dissimilarity. In Total-Set Pairwise Rating Method (PRaM), participants rate the (dis)similarity of all pairs of stimuli on a Likert scale.

Representation of associative and affective semantic similarity of abstract words in the lateral temporal perisylvian language regions.

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 insight into how the meaning of words is structured. In this fMRI study, we apply representational similarity analysis to investigate the conceptual representation of abstract words.

Lexicosemantic, affective, and distributional norms for 1,000 Dutch adjectives.

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 cognition and emotion, as they naturally cover the entire range of lexicosemantic variables such as imageability (infinite-green), and affective variables such as valence (sad-happy).

Age-Related Degree and Criteria Differences in Semantic Categorization.

Individual differences in semantic categorization are commonplace. Individuals apply a word like SPORTS to different instances because they employ different conditions for category membership (vagueness in criteria) or because they differ regarding the extent to which they feel the term can be applied given fixed conditions (vagueness in degree). Three individuals may, for instance, disagree as to whether and are SPORTS, because one believes SPORTS are competitive in nature, while the other two require SPORTS to be effortful (vagueness in criteria).

Predicting Lexical Norms: A Comparison between a Word Association Model and Text-Based Word Co-occurrence 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 processing. We focus on age of acquisition, concreteness, and three affective variables, namely valence, arousal, and dominance, since all these variables have been shown to be fundamental in word meaning. In both studies we use a model based on data obtained in a continued free word association task to predict these variables.

Redefining the resolution of semantic knowledge in the brain: Advances made by the introduction of models of semantics in neuroimaging.

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 neuroimaging data and argue why semantic models are possibly the most valuable addition to the research of semantics in recent years.

Left perirhinal cortex codes for semantic similarity between written words defined from cued word association.

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, how this differed from picture input and how specific it was for perirhinal cortex compared to surrounding structures.

The "Small World of Words" English word association norms for over 12,000 cue words.

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 of word associations for over 12,000 cue words, currently the largest such English-language resource in the world.

Semisupervised category learning facilitates the development of automaticity.

In the human category of learning, learning is studied in a supervised, an unsupervised, or a semisupervised way. The rare human semisupervised category of learning studies all focus on early learning. However, the impact of the semisupervised category learning late in learning, when automaticity develops, is unknown.

Is jellyfish more of a fish in English than in Dutch? The effect of informative labels.

Some words are lexically suggestive about the taxonomic position of their referent (e.g., jellyfish in English), and this information can vary across languages (e.

The (un)reliability of item-level semantic priming effects.

Many researchers have tried to predict semantic priming effects using a myriad of variables (e.g., prime-target associative strength or co-occurrence frequency).

Relationship between extensions and intensions in categorization: A match made in heaven?

The present study investigated the relationship between category extension and intension for 11 different semantic categories. It is often tacitly assumed that there is a (strong) extension-intension link. However, a recent study by Hampton and Passanisi (2016) examining the patterns of stable individual differences in concepts across participants called this hypothesis into question.

Representation of Semantic Similarity in the Left Intraparietal Sulcus: Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Evidence.

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 that have been previously implicated in visuospatial attention, and how it compares to effects of object identity and location. Forty-six subjects participated.

Feature taxonomy: What type of features do children associate with categories and how do they fare in predicting category judgments?

The present study investigates category intension in school-aged children and adults at two different levels of abstraction (i.e., superordinate and basic level) for two category types (i.

Convergence in the Bilingual Lexicon: A Pre-registered Replication of Previous Studies.

Naming patterns of bilinguals have been found to converge and form a new intermediate language system from elements of both the bilinguals' languages. This converged naming pattern differs from the monolingual naming patterns of both a bilingual's languages. We conducted a pre-registered replication study of experiments addressing the question whether there is a convergence between a bilingual's both lexicons.

Structure at every scale: A semantic network account of the similarities between unrelated concepts.

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.

Understanding individual differences in representational abstraction: The role of working memory capacity.

Several studies have reported differences in categorization strategies among participants: some learn a category by making abstraction across the category members while others use a memorization strategy. Despite the prevalence of these differences, little attention has been paid to investigating what influences some to use an abstraction strategy and others a memorization strategy. The current study had two goals: in a first experiment we investigated whether these differences were stable across time, using the parallel form method often used in psychometric research, and in a second experiment we investigated whether the individual differences in categorization strategy were related to working memory capacity.

The Typicality Ranking Task: A New Method to Derive Typicality Judgments from Children.

An alternative method for deriving typicality judgments, applicable in young children that are not familiar with numerical values yet, is introduced, allowing researchers to study gradedness at younger ages in concept development. Contrary to the long tradition of using rating-based procedures to derive typicality judgments, we propose a method that is based on typicality ranking rather than rating, in which items are gradually sorted according to their typicality, and that requires a minimum of linguistic knowledge. The validity of the method is investigated and the method is compared to the traditional typicality rating measurement in a large empirical study with eight different semantic concepts.

Is semantic priming (ir)rational? Insights from the speeded word fragment completion task.

Semantic priming, the phenomenon that a target is recognized faster if it is preceded by a semantically related prime, is a well-established effect. However, the mechanisms producing semantic priming are subject of debate. Several theories assume that the underlying processes are controllable and tuned to prime utility.

Caveats for the spatial arrangement method: Comment on Hout, Goldinger, and Ferguson (2013).

The gold standard among proximity data collection methods for multidimensional scaling is the (dis)similarity rating of pairwise presented stimuli. A drawback of the pairwise method is its lengthy duration, which may cause participants to change their strategy over time, become fatigued, or disengage altogether. Hout, Goldinger, and Ferguson (2013) recently made a case for the Spatial Arrangement Method (SpAM) as an alternative to the pairwise method, arguing that it is faster and more engaging.

Estimating affective word covariates using word association data.

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 similarity to words for which these values are already known.

Filling the gaps: A speeded word fragment completion megastudy.

In the speeded word fragment completion task, participants have to complete fragments such as tom_to as quickly and accurately as possible. Previous work has shown that this paradigm can successfully capture subtle priming effects (Heyman, De Deyne, Hutchison, & Storms Behavior Research Methods, 47, 580-606, 2015). In addition, it has several advantages over the widely used lexical decision task.

Uncovering underlying processes of semantic priming by correlating item-level effects.

The current study examines the underlying processes of semantic priming using the largest priming database available (i.e., Semantic Priming Project, Hutchison et al.