Lk. Tyler et He. Moss, FUNCTIONAL-PROPERTIES OF CONCEPTS - STUDIES OF NORMAL AND BRAIN-DAMAGED PATIENTS, Cognitive neuropsychology, 14(4), 1997, pp. 511-545
It has been claimed that concepts in different semantic domains vary i
n the extent to which their meaning is comprised of different kinds of
semantic information. Discussion has mainly focused around two kinds
of concepts-living things and man-made objects-arguing that functional
information is central to the meaning of artefacts whereas perceptual
information is more important for the meaning of living things. This
distinction has been important in accounting for patterns of semantic
impairments following brain injury (Warrington & Shallice, 1984). We s
uggest that functional information may be especially salient in the se
mantic representations of both living and nonliving things. Our eviden
ce for this claim comes from priming studies with normal subjects, and
data from brain-damaged patients that supports the claim that functio
nal information is relatively spared following brain damage. We explor
e further implications of the role of functional properties in semanti
c representations, considering distinctions between different types of
functional information in the representation of living things. We foc
us on the developmental claim that biological functional information,
such as the fact that animals breathe, reproduce, and eat, is especial
ly salient in the semantic representations of living things. Data from
a patient suffering from herpes encephalitis suggests that this type
of functional information is preserved even though other types of func
tional information (where an animal lives, what it eats) are impaired.
Finally, we account for the relative preservation of functional infor
mation in terms of form-function intercorrelations.