Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Behavioral experiments have demonstrated that people encode knowledge of correlations among semantic prop- erties of entities and that this knowledge influences per- formance on semantic tasks (McRae, 1992; McRae, de Sa, & Seidenberg, 1993). Independently, in connectionist the- ory, it has been claimed that relationships among seman- tic properties may provide structure that is required for the relatively arbitrary mapping from word form to word meaning (Hinton&Shallice, 1991). W e explored these is- sues by implementing a modified Hopfield network (1982, 1984) to simulate the computation from word form to meaning. The model was used as a vehicle for developing explanations for the role played by correlated properties in determining short interval semantic priming effects and in determining the ease with which a property is verified as part of a concept. Simulations of the priming and property verification experiments of McRae (1992) are reported. It is concluded that correlations among properties encoded in conceptual memory play a key role in the dynamics of the computation of word meaning. Furthermore, a model in which property intercorrelations are central to forming basins of attraction corresponding to concepts may pro- vide important insights into lexical memory.