This paper presents the Featural and Unitary Semantic Space (FUSS) hypothesis of the meanings of object and action words. The hypothesis, implemented in a statistical model, is based on the following assumptions: First, it is assumed that the meanings of words are grounded in conceptual featural representations, some of which are organized…

Forgetting in long-term memory, as measured in a recall or a recognition test, is faster for items encoded more recently than for items encoded earlier. Data on forgetting curves fit a power function well. In contrast, many connectionist models predict either exponential decay or completely flat forgetting curves. This paper suggests a…