This paper reviews some controversies concerning the original and revised versions of the ‘hub-and-spoke’ model of conceptual representations and their implication for abstraction capacity levels. The ‘hub-and-spoke’ model, which is based on data gathered in patients with semantic dementia (SD), is the most authoritative model of conceptual knowledge. Patterson et al.’s (Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8(12), 976-987, 2007) classical version of this model maintained that conceptual representations are stored in a unitary ‘amodal’ format in the right and left anterior temporal lobes (ATLs), because in SD the semantic disorder cuts across modalities and categories. Several authors questioned the unitary nature of these representations. They showed that the semantic impairment is ‘multi-modal’only in the advanced stages of SD, when atrophy affects the ATLs bilaterally, but that impariments can be modality-specific in lateralised (early) stages of the disease. In these cases, SD mainly affects lexical-semantic knowledge when atrophy predominates on the left side and pictorial representations when atrophy prevails on the right side. Some aspects of the model (i.e. the importance of spokes, the multimodal format of representations and the graded convergence of modalities within the ATLs), which had already been outlined by Rogers et al. (Psychological Review, 111(1), 205–235, 2004) in a computational model of SD, were strengthened by these results. The relevance of these theoretical problems and of empirical data concerning the neural substrate of concrete and abstract words is discussed critically. The conclusion of the review is that the highest levels of abstraction are due more to the structuring influence of language than to the format of representations.

中文翻译：

---

概念表示格式和语言结构对语义抽象能力水平的不同贡献

本文回顾了有关概念表示的“轮辐式”模型的原始和修订版本及其对抽象能力水平的影响的一些争议。“中心辐射”模型基于语义痴呆（SD）患者收集的数据，是最权威的概念知识模型。帕特森（Patterson）等人（《自然评论》8（12），976-987，2007）该模型的经典版本坚持认为，概念表示以统一的“非模态”格式存储在左右前颞叶（ATL）中，因为在SD中，语义障碍跨越了模态和类别。几位作者质疑这些表示的统一性。他们表明，只有在SD的晚期阶段，当萎缩症对双侧ATL产生影响时，语义障碍才是“多模式的”，但是这种障碍在疾病的偏侧（早期）阶段可能是特定于模式的。在这些情况下，当萎缩在左侧占主导时，SD主要影响词汇语义知识，而当萎缩在右侧占优势时，则主要影响图片语义。模型的某些方面（例如，辐条的重要性，（Rolls等人已经概述了表示形式的多模式格式和ATL中模式的分级收敛）。（这些结果加强了在SD计算模型中的Psychological Review， 111（1），205-235，2004）。批判性地讨论了这些理论问题和与具体和抽象单词的神经底物有关的经验数据的相关性。审查的结论是，最高的抽象水平更多是由于语言的结构性影响，而不是表示形式。