Evidence from psychology and cognitive neuroscience indicates that the human brain’s semantic system contains several specific subsystems, each representing a particular dimension of semantic information. Word ratings on these different semantic dimensions can help investigate the behavioral and neural impacts of semantic dimensions on language processes and build computational representations of language meaning according to the semantic space of the human cognitive system. Existing semantic rating databases provide ratings for hundreds to thousands of words, which can hardly support a comprehensive semantic analysis of natural texts or speech. This article reports a large database, the Six Semantic Dimension Database (SSDD), which contains subjective ratings for 17,940 commonly used Chinese words on six major semantic dimensions: vision, motor, socialness, emotion, time, and space. Furthermore, using computational models to learn the mapping relations between subjective ratings and word embeddings, we include the estimated semantic ratings for 1,427,992 Chinese and 1,515,633 English words in the SSDD. The SSDD will aid studies on natural language processing, text analysis, and semantic representation in the brain.

Language and social cognition are traditionally studied as separate cognitive domains, yet accumulative studies reveal overlapping neural correlates at the left ventral temporoparietal junction (vTPJ) and lateral anterior temporal lobe (lATL), which have been attributed to sentence processing and social concept activation. We propose a common cognitive component underlying both effects -- social-semantic working memory. We confirmed two key predictions of our hypothesis using fMRI: First, the left vTPJ and lATL showed sensitivity to sentences only when the sentences conveyed social meaning.; second, these regions showed persistent social-semantic-selective activity after the linguistic stimuli disappeared. We additionally found that both regions were sensitive to the socialness of nonlinguistic stimuli and were more tightly connected with the social-semantic-processing areas than with the sentence-processing areas. The converging evidence indicates the social-semantic-working-memory function of the left vTPJ and lATL and challenges the general-semantic and/or syntactic accounts for the neural activity of these regions.

No abstract