Effect of congenital blindness on the semantic representation of some everyday concepts

Abstract

This study explores how the lack of first-hand experience with color, as a result of congenital blindness, affects implicit judgments about ''higher-order'' concepts, such as ''fruits and vegetables'' (FV), but not others, such as ''household items'' (HHI). We demonstrate how the differential diagnosticity of color across our test categories interacts with visual experience to produce, in effect, a category-specific difference in implicit similarity. Implicit pair-wise similarity judgments were collected by using an odd-man-out triad task. Pair-wise similarities for both FV and for HHI were derived from this task and were compared by using cluster analysis and regression analyses. Color was found to be a significant component in the structure of implicit similarity for FV for sighted participants but not for blind participants; and this pattern remained even when the analysis was restricted to blind participants who had good explicit color knowledge of the stimulus items. There was also no evidence that either subject group used color knowledge in making decisions about HHI, nor was there an indication of any qualitative differences between blind and sighted subjects' judgments on HHI.additive clustering ͉ color knowledge ͉ similarity

The Role of Action Representations in Thematic Object Relations

“…The present evidence is also relevant to claims regarding the "embodiment" or "groundedness" of object processing (e.g., Martin, 2007;Negri et al, 2007;Barsalou, 2008;Gainotti et al, 2013) in suggesting that deficits in the capacity to activate action knowledge in apraxia after left hemisphere stroke have relevance to apraxics' processing of objects. Finally, the present data are an important extension of the work of Connolly et al (2007) showing that congenitally blind participants fail to implicitly use color information to assess the similarity of fruits and vegetables. Of interest is the fact that, unlike the congenitally blind participants in that study, the Posterior stroke participants in the present study presumably had normal premorbid ability to perceive and recognize action.…”

“…In general support of this reasoning is a study on the effects of blindness on the organization of object concepts. Connolly et al (2007) investigated the degree to which congenitally blind participants were implicitly sensitive to information about object color when making similarity judgments between triads of objects. While sighted participants were sensitive to object color when making similarity judgments between fruits and vegetables, blind participants were not.…”

Meaning and the brain: The neurosemantics of referential, interactive, and combinatorial knowledge

“…It is also essential to consider that Chinese-room type learning of semantics is evident, especially in learners suffering from sensory deprivation. Blind children are able to acquiring important aspects of the usage of colour words (Landau & Gleitman, 1985), even though the role colour information plays for their semantic system slightly differs from that in sighted individuals (Connolly, Gleitman, & Thompson-Schill, 2007). In their colour word learning, semantic information about colour could not possibly be extracted from sensory information but must be combinatorial in nature.…”

From words-as-mappings to words-as-cues: the role of language in semantic knowledge

“…For additional discussion of the semantic organization of knowledge related to the body, see Majid (2015). many individuals who are congenitally blind can also know the characteristic colors of various objects as well as the relationship between color, e.g., that orange is more similar to red than to green (Connolly, Gleitman, & Thompson-Schill, 2007;Marmor, 1978). This knowledge could not have been acquired from perception and owes itself solely to linguistic experiences.…”