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What comes to mind first? Feature type and order of production in a property generation task

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2021

AGOSTINA VORANO ,
LETICIA VIVAS  and
ANDREA MENEGOTTO Open the ORCID record for ANDREA MENEGOTTO [Opens in a new window]
AGOSTINA VORANO*
Affiliation:
Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET)
LETICIA VIVAS
Affiliation:
Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Instituto de Psicología Básica, Aplicada y Tecnología (IPSIBAT), and Facultad de Psicología, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata (UNMdP)
ANDREA MENEGOTTO
Affiliation:
Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), and Instituto de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales (INHUS – UNMdP – CONICET)
*
e-mail:avorano@mdp.edu.ar
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Abstract

Few studies have explored in depth the mechanisms that underlie the execution of the property generation task, in spite of its importance and wide usage. The main exception to this is Santos, Chaigneau, Simmons, and Barsalou’s (2011) research: they claim that the two mechanisms at issue are word association and situated simulation. On the basis of the Linguistic and Situated Simulation theory, these researchers assert that word association is executed by a linguistic system, whilst situated simulation is executed by a situated simulation system. From these claims, the authors derive a series of predictions concerning the types of features that would be produced in the property generation task, and the order in which those types of features would appear. Our aim was to test those predictions, using an existent property generation database in Spanish. Our results are partially in accordance with Santos et al.’s results. The main divergence is related to the behavior of taxonomic superordinate features. We examine alternative explanations to account for this discrepancy. Furthermore, we criticize Santos et al.’s conception about what counts as a linguistic feature, and analyze alternative models about this issue.

Keywords

property generation taskfeature typeorder of production
Type
Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , September 2021 , pp. 337 - 366
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We would like to thank Dr Ava Santos for kindly answering some questions about her research, Dr Adolfo Martín García for having discussed interesting ideas with us, and Dr Nicolás Artemio Rodríguez for having collaborated with the analysis of the data. We would also like to thank the Consejo Interuniversitario Nacional for having financially supported this research. We are also thankful to two anonymous reviewers and Dr Bodo Winter for their valuable observations, which helped us improve this paper.

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