Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Two different views of the organization of verbs in the mental lexicon have been formulated in recent years: the matrix view and the cluster view. The matrix view suggests that a verb shares as many features with verbs from other clusters as it shares with verbs from its own cluster. Thus, instead of being organized, like concrete nouns into well-defined hierarchies, verbs in the mental lexicon form a matrix like structure. While admitting differences between the organization of verb and noun lexicons, the cluster view claims that verbs form hierarchically organized clusters that resemble noun hierarchies in many ways. We report one study that extends research on similarity of nouns to verbs in order to shed light on these accounts. Subjects were presented with pairs of verbs and asked to list their commonalities or differences. The obtained patterns of commonalities, alignable and nonalignable differences are similar to the patterns obtained for hierarchies of nouns and are consistent with the cluster view of verb organization.