Article
The_associative_system_of_early-learned_Hebrew_ver.pdf
Cognitive linguistics
(2023)
Abstract
This paper compares the associative system of early-learned verbs and
body parts in Hebrew with previously published data on American English
(Maouene, Josita, Shohei Hidaka & Linda B. Smith. 2008. Body parts and earlylearned
verbs. Cognitive Science 32(7). 1200–1216). Following themethodology of the
former study, 51 Hebrew-speaking college students gave the first body part that
came to mind for each of 103 early-learned Hebrew verbs, 81 of which were
translational equivalents. Rate of convergence and divergence and underlying
patterns were used to make inferences about the constraints at work. Overall
convergence (92.3% of the Hebrew data and 93.7% of the English data) reveal
similar entropy levels, comparable semantic field shapes of verbs organized by
body parts and similar general cluster patterns of verbs by body parts. Most
divergence lies in the infrequent responses (offered fewer than 1% of the time)
which arise around body parts that are internal, very detailed, very general categorically,
used in figurative language, uniquely provided and tend to be subject to
cultural taboos. This is a new contribution, as previous work has not quantified the
relative proportion of convergent to divergent associations. We discuss how these
findings support neural and developmental continuity and stability in the verbal
system with respect to the categorization of verbs by body parts cross-culturally.
Keywords
- Associations,
- Hebrew,
- English,
- early-learned verbs,
- body parts
Disciplines
Publication Date
2023
Citation Information
Maouene, Josita, Sethuraman, Nitya, Uziel-Karl, Sigal and Hidaka, Shohei. "The associative system of early-learned Hebrew verbs and body parts: a comparative study with American English" Cognitive Linguistics, vol. 34, no. 1, 2023, pp. 1-34. https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2022-0038
Creative Commons license
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