Personal and Common Components of Cognitive Dictionaries

Abstract

Cognitive dictionaries were described as having two separable semantic organizations. One component, structured initially by principles intrinsic to the child's own level of intellect, was defined as the individualistic, or personal, semantic organization involved in verbal thought. The other component was characterized as common to all adults in the same linguistic community. This hypothetical dual-component structure of cognitive dictionaries was supported by successful idiographic predictions of free word-association performances and by empirical verification of the underlying transformational structure proposed to generate the predicted performances. The dual-component structure was compatible with the views of Nelson, Vygotsky, and Piaget, and also with the work of Luria, Razran, Cofer, and others on semantic conditioning.