The question of whether people's experience in the world shapes conceptual representation and lexical semantics is longstanding. Word-association, feature-listing and similarity rating tasks aim to address this question but require a subjective interpretation of the latent dimensions identified. In this study, we introduce a supervised representational-alignment method that (i) determines whether two groups of individuals share the same basis of a certain category, and (ii) explains in what respects they differ. In applying this method, we show that congenital blindness induces conceptual reorganization in both a-modal and sensory-related verbal domains, and we identify the associated semantic shifts. We first apply supervised feature-pruning to a language model (GloVe) to optimize prediction accuracy of human similarity judgments from word embeddings. Pruning identifies one subset of retained GloVe features that optimizes prediction of judgments made by sighted individuals and another subset that optimizes judgments made by blind. A linear probing analysis then interprets the latent semantics of these feature-subsets by learning a mapping from the retained GloVe features to 65 interpretable semantic dimensions. We applied this approach to seven semantic domains, including verbs related to motion, sight, touch, and amodal verbs related to knowledge acquisition. We find that blind individuals more strongly associate social and cognitive meanings to verbs related to motion or those communicating non-speech vocal utterances (e.g., whimper, moan). Conversely, for amodal verbs, they demonstrate much sparser information. Finally, for some verbs, representations of blind and sighted are highly similar. The study presents a formal approach for studying interindividual differences in word meaning, and the first demonstration of how blindness impacts conceptual representation of everyday verbs.

翻译：人们的世界经验是否塑造概念表征与词汇语义，这一问题由来已久。词语联想、特征列举和相似度评分任务旨在探讨该问题，但需对识别出的潜在维度进行主观解释。本研究提出一种有监督的表征对齐方法，该方法能够：(i) 判断两组个体是否共享某类范畴的共同基础，以及(ii) 解释他们在哪些方面存在差异。应用该方法，我们证明先天性失明会导致跨模态和感觉相关的言语领域中的概念重组，并识别出相关的语义转变。我们首先对语言模型（GloVe）应用有监督的特征剪枝，以优化从词嵌入预测人类相似性判断的准确性。剪枝识别出两组GloVe特征子集：一组优化对明眼人判断的预测，另一组优化对盲人判断的预测。随后，通过线性探针分析，我们学习从保留的GloVe特征到65个可解释语义维度的映射，从而解释这些特征子集的潜在语义。我们将该方法应用于七个语义领域，包括与运动、视觉、触觉相关的动词，以及与知识获取相关的非模态动词。我们发现，盲人更强烈地将社会性和认知性意义关联至运动动词或非言语发声类动词（如抽泣、呻吟）。相反，对于非模态动词，他们呈现出的信息则稀疏得多。最后，对于某些动词，盲人与明眼人的表征高度相似。本研究提出了一种研究个体间词义差异的形式化方法，并首次揭示了失明如何影响日常动词的概念表征。