The Temporal Evolution of Modality-Independent Representations of Conceptual Categories
Julien Dirani, Liina Pylkk\"anen

TL;DR
This study used MEG decoding to show that both picture naming and word reading activate shared, modality-independent semantic category representations starting around 150ms, with different timing relative to lexical access.
Contribution
It provides evidence for the temporal dynamics of amodal conceptual representations during language production, using a novel cross-modal decoding approach.
Findings
Shared semantic category representations activate around 150ms.
Semantic categories are activated before lexical access in picture naming.
Semantic categories activate after lexical access in word reading.
Abstract
To what extent does language production activate amodal conceptual representations? In picture naming, we view specific exemplars of concepts and then name them with a category label, like 'dog'. In contrast, in overt reading, the written word expresses the category (dog), not an exemplar. Here we used a decoding approach with magnetoencephalography to address whether picture naming and overt word reading involve shared representations of semantic categories. This addresses a fundamental question about the modality-generality of conceptual representations and their temporal evolution. Crucially, we do this using a language production task that does not require explicit categorization judgment and that controls for word form properties across semantic categories. We trained our models to classify the animal/tool distinction using MEG data of one modality at each time point and then…
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Taxonomy
TopicsLanguage and cultural evolution · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
