Abstract
We measured spoken word recognition time for different lists of Russian adjectives. Thesaurus of adjectives is smaller than thesauri of nouns and verbs, making it more convenient for experimentation. 40 words were presented to a listener in a single experiment lasting about 90 s. In hundreds of trials we invariably observed robust ordering from the most quickly recognized word to the “slowest” one. The spoken word recognition process looks like a sweep in a space of words. We conjecture that this reflects cortical representation of the thesaurus of words, which are arranged into semantically close groups. Inside the group the words are ordered so that their meaning gradually changes along the list of words. Our experiments with words are in line with experimental studies of travelling waves in the cortex and their theoretical description. We believe that the retrieval of words from the cortical memory is mediated by the cortical travelling waves.
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Acknowledgments
The work is supported by the Russian Fund for Basic Research, grant 18-00-00575 comfi. Sokolov M. compiled data acquisition software.
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Vvedensky, V., Gurtovoy, K. (2021). Topology of the Thesaurus of Russian Adjectives Revealed by Measurements of the Spoken Word Recognition Time. In: Kryzhanovsky, B., Dunin-Barkowski, W., Redko, V., Tiumentsev, Y. (eds) Advances in Neural Computation, Machine Learning, and Cognitive Research IV. NEUROINFORMATICS 2020. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 925. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60577-3_9
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