What we mean when we say semantic: Toward a multidisciplinary semantic glossary
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13423_2024_Article_2556.pdf
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1.54 MB
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df2252c5f7d4dbc142fc31460ade0673
Author(s)
Reilly, Jamie
Shain, Cory
Borghesani, Valentina
Kuhnke, Philipp
Vigliocco, Gabriella
Peelle, Jonathan E.
Mahon, Bradford Z.
Buxbaum, Laurel J.
Majid, Asifa
Brysbaert, Marc
Date Issued
September 4, 2024
Journal
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
Publisher
Springer US
Citation
Reilly, J., Shain, C., Borghesani, V. et al. What we mean when we say semantic: Toward a multidisciplinary semantic glossary. Psychon Bull Rev (2024).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
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 meanings in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. As such, many fundamental constructs used to delineate semantic theories remain underspecified and/or opaque. Weak construct specificity is among the leading causes of the replication crisis now facing psychology and related fields. Term ambiguity hinders cross-disciplinary communication, falsifiability, and incremental theory-building. Numerous cognitive subdisciplines (e.g., vision, affective neuroscience) have recently addressed these limitations via the development of consensus-based guidelines and definitions. The project to follow represents our effort to produce a multidisciplinary semantic glossary consisting of succinct definitions, background, principled dissenting views, ratings of agreement, and subjective confidence for 17 target constructs (e.g., abstractness, abstraction, concreteness, concept, embodied cognition, event semantics, lexical-semantic, modality, representation, semantic control, semantic feature, simulation, semantic distance, semantic dimension). We discuss potential benefits and pitfalls (e.g., implicit bias, prescriptiveness) of these efforts to specify a common nomenclature that other researchers might index in specifying their own theoretical perspectives (e.g., They said X, but I mean Y).
MIT Department
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-024-02556-7
