Systematicity and specialization in semantics:
A computational account of optic aphasia
Sean McGuire and David C. Plaut
Department of Psychology
Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract
Modality-specific naming deficits, such as optic aphasia, have been taken as
evidence that semantics is organized into distinct modality-specific
subsystems. We adopt an alternative view in which semantics is a learned,
internal representation within a parallel distributed processing system that
maps between multiple input and output modalities. We show that the robustness
of a task to damage depends critically on its systematicity, and that
modality-specific naming deficits can arise because naming is an unsystematic
task.