ABSTRACT
Meaning underpins all activities: linguistic, cognitive, and social. Referring to things or properties in the world, then, is an important aspect of meaning. The psychological representation of meaning is sufficiently powerful to enable us to do this sort of thing, but that doesn't mean it is that thing. Collins and Quillian presented a model of semantic memory known as a semantic network. The idea of a semantic feature is a useful and powerful one: the author represents the meanings of words by different combinations of a much smaller number of semantic features. He spent some time with connectionist network model because although it is a model of a specific neuropsychological disorder, it shows how can develop the semantic feature approach to construct a coherent and plausible account of how the mind deals with meaning. The central idea, though, is that the vocabulary and naming problems in dementia are caused by the progressive loss of semantic features.
