Paper abstract: This paper compares the associative system of early-learned verbs and body parts in Hebrew with previously published data on American English (Maouene, Josita, Shohei Hidaka & Linda B. Smith. 2008. Body parts and early-learned verbs. Cognitive Science 32(7). 1200–1216). Following the methodology of the former study, 51 Hebrew-speaking college students gave the first body part that came to mind for each of 103 early-learned Hebrew verbs, 81 of which were translational equivalents. Rate of convergence and divergence and underlying patterns were used to make inferences about the constraints at work. Overall convergence (92.3% of the Hebrew data and 93.7% of the English data) reveal similar entropy levels, comparable semantic field shapes of verbs organized by body parts and similar general cluster patterns of verbs by body parts. Most divergence lies in the infrequent responses (offered fewer than 1% of the time) which arise around body parts that are internal, very detailed, very general categorically, used in figurative language, uniquely provided and tend to be subject to cultural taboos. This is a new contribution, as previous work has not quantified the relative proportion of convergent to divergent associations. We discuss how these findings support neural and developmental continuity and stability in the verbal system with respect to the categorization of verbs by body parts cross-culturally.

Dataset description: The dataset consists of two matrices: the first matrix is composed of 101 early-learned American English verbs by 61 body parts as provided by 50 American English speakers. The second matrix displays 103 early-learned Hebrew verbs by 73 body parts provided by 51 Hebrew speakers. The English data collections was done at Indiana University Bloomington, IN, in 2004. A partial analysis of the data set was published between 2006 and 2008. The data collection in Hebrew was done at Ono Academic College (in Hebrew: הקריה האקדמית אונו) located in Kiryat Ono, Tel Aviv region, Israel, in 2012. This is the first publication for this data set.