  Many studies in the neurosciences have dealt with the semantic processing of
words or categories, but few have looked into the semantic organization of the
lexicon thought as a system. The present study was designed to try to move
towards this goal, using both electrophysiological and corpus-based data, and
to compare two languages from different families: French and Mandarin Chinese.
  We conducted an EEG-based semantic-decision experiment using 240 words from
eight categories (clothing, parts of a house, tools, vehicles,
fruits/vegetables, animals, body parts, and people) as the material. A
data-analysis method (correspondence analysis) commonly used in computational
linguistics was applied to the electrophysiological signals.
  The present cross-language comparison indicated stability for the following
aspects of the languages' lexical semantic organizations: (1) the
living/nonliving distinction, which showed up as a main factor for both
languages; (2) greater dispersion of the living categories as compared to the
nonliving ones; (3) prototypicality of the \emph{animals} category within the
living categories, and with respect to the living/nonliving distinction; and
(4) the existence of a person-centered reference gradient. Our
electrophysiological analysis indicated stability of the networks at play in
each of these processes. Stability was also observed in the data taken from
word usage in the languages (synonyms and associated words obtained from
textual corpora).
