Colors in blind and sighted subjects: Evidence from semantic feature norms

We may imagine, for a moment, that we are living in a world without concepts in which we perceive thousands of objects but we are not be able to remember them. Our language would be drastically reduced or worse, it would not exist, and our knowledge of the world would be simplistic and we would probably be confined in a chaotic situation. As Murphy recalls, concepts can be considered the “glue that holds our mental world together”, and not only. Concepts can be thought as the interface between ourselves and the world, in which the human language plays a central role giving them a shape to be communicated. The great interest for this field has inspired many theories across the centuries, but only in the last few years may we note remarkable improvements, thanks also to the birth of Artificial Iintelligence, the application of maths and the different approaches to the problem. Every field of research, in particular philosophy, linguistics, biology, Artificial Intelligence and maths contribute to enriching the newest conceptual models in order to provide a more exhaustive explanation of our internal universe called cognition.In the first chapter we discuss some theories of concepts focusing our attention on three featural theories which can be explained in the light of symbolic and embodied models. We analyse the consequences supported by these two types of models applied to the featural theories, and we will see the possible conceptual systematizations.The second chapter concentrates on congenitally blind people in which we introduce an important study realized by Connolly et al. (2007) and we try to interpret the results found considering the two types of models proposed in the previous chapter. In the third chapter we concentrate on feature norms as a method of elicitation of information. We describe the advantages and the limits of this method and, after having described some existing studies, we will describe our own study based on elicitation of feature norms from both sighted and blind people.In the fourth chapter we analyse the data collected concentrating our efforts on the production of physical properties and in particular on color production. We systematized our results graphically in order to clarify our findings.The last chapter consists of a reflection on data collected and some possible partial conclusions obtained thanks to this work