Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A series of simulations using the HAL model of memory demonstrates that word representations from the model can be used to categorize a variety of common and famous proper nouns, cities, and states. The internal semantics of famous proper names provides a richer set of meaning constraints than do the neighborhoods of common proper names. Retrieval errors with names may be due to this difference in the neighbors and the density of these neighborhoods. A very salient constraint in common proper name semantics is gender.