Concepts, control and context: A connectionist account of normal and disordered semantic cognition

words is governed by the distributional principle. Words that frequently occur in the same contexts come to have similar semantic representations because they generate similar predictions. 3. The units in the hub make no strong distinction between concrete and abstract words. Concrete and abstract words can be represented as similar to one another if they occur in similar contexts (e.g., journey and distance and the vehicles). Of course, concrete and abstract words are more strongly distinguished in the S-M units, where only concrete words elicit strong patterns of activity (though abstract words come to generate some weaker activity here too; see below).