Mirman, D. & Graziano, K. M.
Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute, Philadelphia, USA
Knowledge about word and object meanings can be organized around categories, such as fruits or mammals, which are defined by shared features, or around events such as eating breakfast or taking a dog for a walk. An eye-tracking study showed that both kinds of knowledge are automatically activated during comprehension of a single spoken word, even when the listener is not required to perform any active task. The results further revealed that an individual’s relative activation of category-based relations compared to event-based relations predicts that individual’s tendency to favor category or event relations when asked to choose between them in a similarity judgment task. These results argue that individuals differ in the relative strengths of their category-based and event-based semantic knowledge and suggest that meaning information is organized in two parallel, complementary semantic systems.