Ae. Hillis et al., CONSTRAINING CLAIMS ABOUT THEORIES OF SEMANTIC MEMORY - MORE ON UNITARY VERSUS MULTIPLE SEMANTICS, Cognitive neuropsychology, 12(2), 1995, pp. 175-186
In Caramazza, Hillis, Rapp, and Romani (1990) we proposed that the var
ious patterns of impaired performance that have been used to motivate
proposals of modality-specific semantics can, instead, be accommodated
by an amodal unitary semantics account-the Organised Unitary Content
Hypothesis (OUCH). Chertkow, Bub, and Caplan (1992), based on their st
udy of the performance of seven patients with dementia of the Alzheime
r's type, reported data that are supposedly problematic for OUCH. Here
we respond by showing that Chertkow and colleagues have misinterprete
d our proposal on a number of points and that, in fact, the ''problema
tic'' results can be easily accounted for within OUCH. Chertkow et al.
made the further claim that their results favour an alternative model
of semantic processing, according to which the processing of perceptu
al-functional semantic information is distinguished from the processin
g of associative semantic information. We argue here that until Chertk
ow et al. specify a number of critical features of their proposal it w
ill not be possible to evaluate their claims.