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Contrasting the semantic typology biases of deaf and hearing people in their conceptualization of time and space
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Description: The mental lexicon helps to describe the relationships between individual concepts/objects as members of conceptual domains. Studies on spoken and signed languages suggest partial overlaps between them. The aim of this study was to describe and compare the semantic networks of the conceptual domains of space and time in the Uruguayan Deaf population and Spanish hearers. 60 participants carried out a word association task in their respective languages (spoken vs signed) and with semantically equivalent lexical items. Deaf and hearers showed semantic networks with strong differentiated semantic clustering and similar entropy. Only one (SUMMER) of 39 clues showed over a .80 of similarity in the associates between both populations. Additionally, the hearers show a bias to to taxonomic and introspective semantic relationships. In contrast, the Deaf showed a bias toward situational semantic relationships and entities. These findings suggest differences in the involvement of memory mechanisms and concrete / abstract thinking between both populations when organizing their mental lexicon.
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