What comes to mind first? Feature type and order of production in a property generation task

Abstract

Few studies have explored in depth the mechanisms that underlie the execution of the property generation task, in spite of its importance and wide usage. The main exception to this is Santos, Chaigneau, Simmons, and Barsalou's (2011) research: they claim that the two mechanisms at issue are word association and situated simulation. On the basis of the Linguistic and Situated Simulation theory, these researchers assert that word association is executed by a linguistic system, whilst situated simulation is executed by a situated simulation system. From these claims, the authors derive a series of predictions concerning the types of features that would be produced in the property generation task, and the order in which those types of features would appear. Our aim was to test those predictions, using an existent property generation database in Spanish. Our results are partially in accordance with Santos et al.'s results. The main divergence is related to the behavior of taxonomic superordinate features. We examine alternative explanations to account for this discrepancy. Furthermore, we criticize Santos et al.'s conception about what counts as a linguistic feature, and analyze alternative models about this issue.