The processes tapped by the widely-used word association (WA) paradigm remain a matter of debate: while some authors consider them as driven by lexical co-occurrences, others emphasize the role of meaning-based connections. To test these contrastive hypotheses, we analyzed responses in a WA task in terms of their normative defining features (those describing the object denoted by the cue word). Results indicate that 72.5% of the responses had medium-to-high coincidence with such defining semantic features. Moreover, 75.51% of responses had medium-to-high values of Relevance (a measure of the importance of the feature for construing a given concept). Furthermore, most responses (62.7%) referred to elements of the situation in which the concept usually appears, followed by sensory properties (e.g., color) of the denoted object (27.86%). These results suggest that the processes behind WA tasks involve a reactivation of the cue item's semantic properties, particularly those most relevant to its core meaning.

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En los últimos años se ha producido una profusa investigación en torno al tema de la memoria semántica en la vejez. En ese marco el presente trabajo abordó la producción de atributos semánticos y las variaciones en la fluencia verbal en el envejecimiento cognitivo normal. Existen numerosos estudios sobre fluencia, pero son exiguos los estudios que comparan la distancia semántica entre conceptos en poblaciones de jóvenes y de mayores de una misma región. El objeto de este trabajo es comparar y analizar la distancia y la riqueza semántica por medio de la fluencia, dada para 130 conceptos por 90 adultos mayores de 65 años cognitivamente conservados, con los atributos producidos por 90 adultos jóvenes, tal como se hallan en las Normas de Producción de Atributos Semánticos en Español. Los atributos semánticos fueron empíricamente colectados en forma escrita y corresponden a las categorías de seres vivos y no vivos. Se encuentran diferencias significativas en fluencia verbal y convergencia en la constitución semántica entre los conceptos dados por ambos grupos etarios.Palabras clave: Atributos. Distancia Semántica. Fluencia Verbal. Adultos Mayores. Adultos Jóvenes

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It has been suggested that human communities that share their basic cultural foundations evince no remarkable differences concerning the characterization of core concepts. However, the small but existing differences among them reflect their sociocultural diversity. This study compares 219 concrete concepts common to both Spanish and English semantic feature norms in order to assess whether core features of concepts follow a universal or cultural language-specific pattern. Concepts were compared through a geometric technique of vector comparison in the Euclidean n-dimensional space alongside the calculation of the network’s degree of centrality. The role of cognate status was also explored by repeating the former analysis separating cognate from noncognate words. Taken together, our data show that languages are structurally similar independent of the cognate status of words, further suggesting that there are some sort of core features common to both languages.