Editing WordNet (section)

== Psycholinguistic aspects ==
The initial goal of the WordNet project was to build a lexical database that would be consistent with theories of human semantic memory developed in the late 1960s. Psychological experiments indicated that speakers organized their knowledge of concepts in an economic, hierarchical fashion. Retrieval time required to access conceptual knowledge seemed to be directly related to the number of hierarchies the speaker needed to "traverse" to access the knowledge. Thus, speakers could more quickly verify that ''canaries can sing'' because a canary is a songbird, but required slightly more time to verify that ''canaries can fly'' (where they had to access the concept "bird" on the superordinate level) and even more time to verify ''canaries have skin'' (requiring look-up across multiple levels of hyponymy, up to "animal").<ref>Collins A., Quillian M. R. 1972. Experiments on Semantic Memory and Language Comprehension. In ''Cognition in Learning and Memory''. Wiley, New York.</ref>
While such [[psycholinguistics|psycholinguistic]] experiments and the underlying theories have been subject to criticism, some of WordNet's organization is consistent with experimental evidence. For example, [[anomic aphasia]] selectively affects speakers' ability to produce words from a specific semantic category, a WordNet hierarchy. Antonymous adjectives (WordNet's central adjectives in the dumbbell structure) are found to co-occur far more frequently than chance, a fact that has been found to hold for many languages.