{"pk":49814,"title":"Structural Alignment Across Visual and Linguistic Modalities:  A Developmental Refinement Perspective","subtitle":null,"abstract":"This study investigates the structural alignment of conceptual representations accessed from visual and linguistic modalities in 8-9-year-old children and adults. Using a Spatial Arrangement (SpAM) task, participants organized familiar items from two categories – household items (HHI) and vegetables & fruits (VF) – presented separately as images and written words on a two-dimensional grid. Representational dissimilarity matrices were computed based on item distances within each modality and analyzed for structural alignment across modalities. Results showed significantly lower cross-modal alignment in children compared to adults, suggesting ongoing developmental changes in the structure of conceptual representations. Additionally, cross-modal alignment was higher for VF than for HHI categories in both age groups, indicating category-specific variations in conceptual organization and its refinement. These findings provide insights into the gradual refinement of the structure of the lexical-conceptual system, extending beyond item-level lexical learning.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Psychology; Concepts and categories; Development; Representation; Quantitative Behavior"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5cv4t5mf","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Luan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Li","name_suffix":"","institution":"Shanghai Jiao Tong University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49814/galley/37776/download/"}]}