Proper and common names in the semantic system

Abstract

Proper names are an important part of language and communication. They are thought to have a special status due to their neuropsychological and psycholinguistic pro le. To what extent proper names rely on the same semantic system as common names is not clear. In an fMRI study, we presented the same group of participants with both proper and common names in order to compare associated activations.Both person and place names, as well as personally familiar and famous names were used, and compared with words representing concrete and abstract concepts. A whole-brain analysis was followed by a detailed analysis of subdivisions of four regions of interest known to play a central role in the semantic system: angular gyrus, anterior temporal lobe, posterior cingulate complex, and medial temporal lobe. We found that most subdivisions within these regions bilaterally were activated by both proper names and common names. The bilateral perirhinal and right entorhinal cortex showed a response speci c to proper names, suggesting an item-speci c role in retrieving person and place related information. While activation to person and place names overlapped greatly, place names were differentiated by activating areas associated with spatial memory and navigation. Person names showed greater right hemisphere involvement compared to places, suggesting a wider range of associations. Personally familiar names showed stronger activation bilaterally compared to famous names, indicating representations that are enhanced by autobiographic and episodic details. Both proper and common names are processed in the wider semantic system that contains associative, episodic, and spatial components.

Electroencephalography Searchlight Decoding Reveals Person- and Place-specific Responses for Semantic Category and Familiarity

“…Another possible explanation could be the peculiar relevance of conspecifics in human brain processing, be it because of evolutionary (Mahon & Caramazza, 2011) or social (Olson et al, 2013) factors. Both our results and this theoretical view seem to be consistent with the analysis of BOLD activation in (Desai et al, 2022), where it is shown that, when comparing areas selectively activated by either people or place names, the former involve a substantially larger amount of brain voxels (23768mm 3 vs 7035mm 3 ), whereas the latter mostly seem to involve a subset of areas associated with processing of people names.…”

“…Temporo-parietal clusters are compatible with traditional accounts of proper name processing which have implicated both anterior and posterior temporal areas (Semenza, 2011;O'Rourke & de Diego Balaguer, 2020;Desai et al, 2022). Frontal and posterior midline clusters, where decoding provided higher scores especially when looking for familiarity (Figure 3), may reflect the activity of the Default Mode Network, which is involved in social cognition and episodic (self-related) memory retrieval (Raichle, 2015;Campbell, Louw, Michniak, & Tanaka, 2020;Smallwood et al, 2021;Kaefer, Stella, McNaughton, & Battaglia, 2022).…”

“…While it has been shown in previous neuroimaging studies that processing people and places involves partially distinct brain areas which can be selectively impaired, it is an open question why decoding, whose success can be interpreted as reflecting ease of processing individual identities in the brain, should be easier when considering people instead of places. (Kaminski et al, 2022) and (Desai et al, 2022) discuss some reasons why this could be the case. People identity could be easier to process because richer semantic knowledge involving multiple modalities is available about people (voice, face, autobiographical experiences), while places only involve visual and less autobiographical knowledge (Kaminski et al, 2022); or they could involve a larger set of secondary meanings and associations with other concepts (Desai et al, 2022).…”

“…(Kaminski et al, 2022) and (Desai et al, 2022) discuss some reasons why this could be the case. People identity could be easier to process because richer semantic knowledge involving multiple modalities is available about people (voice, face, autobiographical experiences), while places only involve visual and less autobiographical knowledge (Kaminski et al, 2022); or they could involve a larger set of secondary meanings and associations with other concepts (Desai et al, 2022).…”

“…Proper names refer to individual entities, also called unique entities or individual concepts-personally and socially relevant entities such as people, places, pets, or works of art (Jeshion, 2009;Semenza, 2009Semenza, , 2022. In cognitive neuroscience, people and geographical places are the two semantic categories whose proper names seem to most clearly involve entity-specific semantic processes in the brain, differing from those involved with generic (non-individual) entities (Martins & Farrajota, 2007;Desai, Tadimeti, & Riccardi, 2022).…”