Concrete Nouns in Kannada: How Distinct Are their Semantic Features?

Abstract

Understanding the representation of meaning of words in the mental lexicon has received considerable attention in research studies on Psycholinguistics, Speech language sciences, Cognitive linguistics and Neurolinguistics. Studies carried out in this regard have used semantic features as a key to understand the underlying processes of storage and organization. The meaning of words, which in turn denote concepts are assumed to vary depending on their distinctive features as well as shared features. Distinctive features are those thatare unique to a small set of concepts whereas the shared features are present in abundance. In the field of Speech Language Pathology semantic features have been targeted in therapy techniques to decrease thesemantic deficitsin persons with aphasia and semantic dementia. Owing to the significance of semantic features in our understanding of semantic processing, the present study was conducted to examinethe nature of distribution of distinctive features of words in Kannada language. The study describes distinctive features generated for 60 concrete nouns of Kannada (30-living thing; 30-non living things) by 60 native adult speakers. The responses are analyzed using custom software and computer programs developedand written for this purpose.The results offerempirical evidence for the differences in the distribution of distinctive features of living and non living things. Implications of the results fortreatment of semantic deficits have been discussed