My work pictured by AI – Abigail Licata

What is this work about? The neural underpinnings of semantic representations involve a distributed network of cortical regions that integrate multimodal information relating to concepts. These semantic representations are formed dynamically through novel experience and information, including linguistic. Most models of semantic knowledge and its structure in the brain have been based on western monolingual populations that fail to capture the rich and diverse multilingual experience that is the reality for a majority of the global population. In multilingual speakers, a given concept is represented by multiple labels, with each label comprising its own phonological and lexico-semantic connections between and within languages. Moreover, evidence from linguistics and cognitive science suggest behavioral and physiological cross-linguistic differences in several conceptual domains and their respective boundaries, including colors, household containers, motion events and odors. Therefore, in the multilingual speaker, increased inter-language connections at phonological, lexico-semantic and conceptual levels may interact with language-specific properties inherent to word meaning and subsequent categorization (i.e., lexico-semantic features), altering the relevance of certain properties of the concept itself and its relational association to other concepts. Whether this alteration leads to differences in the quantity and quality of semantic representations and their associations in multilinguals of typologically-distinct versus typologically-similar languages is unclear and forms the central question of this thesis; implications of these findings may extend to patients with semantic dementia, a language-related neurodegenerative disease which destroys conceptual knowledge overtime.

The first word that came to mind when seeing the AI-generated picture? Eclecticism.