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Beekhuizen, Barend; Armstrong, Blair C.; Stevenson, Suzanne – Cognitive Science, 2021
Lexical ambiguity--the phenomenon of a single word having multiple, distinguishable senses--is pervasive in language. Both the degree of ambiguity of a word (roughly, its number of senses) and the relatedness of those senses have been found to have widespread effects on language acquisition and processing. Recently, distributional approaches to…
Descriptors: Ambiguity (Semantics), Lexicology, Semantics, English
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Li, Jiangtian; Joanisse, Marc F. – Cognitive Science, 2021
Most words in natural languages are polysemous; that is, they have related but different meanings in different contexts. This one-to-many mapping of form to meaning presents a challenge to understanding how word meanings are learned, represented, and processed. Previous work has focused on solutions in which multiple static semantic…
Descriptors: Computational Linguistics, Semantics, Ambiguity (Semantics), Language Processing
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Rissman, Lilia; van Putten, Saskia; Majid, Asifa – Cognitive Science, 2022
At conceptual and linguistic levels of cognition, events are said to be represented in terms of abstract categories, for example, the sentence "Jackie cut the bagel with a knife" encodes the categories Agent (i.e., "Jackie") and Patient (i.e., "the bagel"). In this paper, we ask whether entities such as "the…
Descriptors: Schemata (Cognition), Indo European Languages, English, German
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Bidgood, Amy; Pine, Julian M.; Rowland, Caroline F.; Ambridge, Ben – Cognitive Science, 2020
All accounts of language acquisition agree that, by around age 4, children's knowledge of grammatical constructions is abstract, rather than tied solely to individual lexical items. The aim of the present research was to investigate, focusing on the passive, whether children's and adults' performance is additionally semantically constrained,…
Descriptors: Syntax, Grammar, Children, Adults
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Reijnierse, W. Gudrun; Burgers, Christian; Bolognesi, Marianna; Krennmayr, Tina – Cognitive Science, 2019
Concreteness ratings are frequently used in a variety of disciplines to operationalize differences between concrete and abstract words and concepts. However, most ratings studies present items in isolation, thereby overlooking the potential polysemy of words. Consequently, ratings for polysemous words may be conflated, causing a threat to the…
Descriptors: Semantics, Nouns, English, Figurative Language
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Peter Hendrix; Ching Chu Sun; Henry Brighton; Andreas Bender – Cognitive Science, 2023
Previous studies provided evidence for a connection between language processing and language change. We add to these studies with an exploration of the influence of lexical-distributional properties of words in orthographic space, semantic space, and the mapping between orthographic and semantic space on the probability of lexical extinction.…
Descriptors: Language Processing, Second Language Learning, Second Language Instruction, Language Maintenance
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Lazaridou, Angeliki; Marelli, Marco; Baroni, Marco – Cognitive Science, 2017
By the time they reach early adulthood, English speakers are familiar with the meaning of thousands of words. In the last decades, computational simulations known as distributional semantic models (DSMs) have demonstrated that it is possible to induce word meaning representations solely from word co-occurrence statistics extracted from a large…
Descriptors: English, Language Acquisition, Semantics, Models
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Stickles, Elise; Lewis, Tasha N. – Cognitive Science, 2018
Experimental work has shown that spatial experiences influence spatiotemporal metaphor use. In these studies, participants are asked a question that yields different responses depending on the metaphor participants use. It has been claimed that English speakers are equally likely to respond with either variant in the absence of priming. Related…
Descriptors: Meta Analysis, Ambiguity (Semantics), Spatial Ability, Time
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Yun, Hongoak; Choi, Soonja – Cognitive Science, 2018
This study has two goals. First, we present much-needed empirical linguistic data and systematic analyses on the spatial semantic systems in English and Korean, two languages that have been extensively compared to date in the debate on spatial language and spatial cognition. We conduct our linguistic investigation comprehensively, encompassing the…
Descriptors: Semantics, Spatial Ability, Contrastive Linguistics, Korean
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Tzeng, Christina Y.; Nygaard, Lynne C.; Namy, Laura L. – Cognitive Science, 2017
Although language has long been regarded as a primarily arbitrary system, "sound symbolism," or non-arbitrary correspondences between the sound of a word and its meaning, also exists in natural language. Previous research suggests that listeners are sensitive to sound symbolism. However, little is known about the specificity of these…
Descriptors: Native Speakers, English, Oral Language, Phonics
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Özçaliskan, Seyda; Lucero, Ché; Goldin-Meadow, Susan – Cognitive Science, 2018
Sighted speakers of different languages vary systematically in how they package and order components of a motion event in speech. These differences influence how semantic elements are organized in gesture, but only when those gestures are produced with speech (co-speech gesture), not without speech (silent gesture). We ask whether the…
Descriptors: Blindness, Adults, Native Speakers, English
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Devereux, Barry J.; Taylor, Kirsten I.; Randall, Billi; Geertzen, Jeroen; Tyler, Lorraine K. – Cognitive Science, 2016
Understanding spoken words involves a rapid mapping from speech to conceptual representations. One distributed feature-based conceptual account assumes that the statistical characteristics of concepts' features--the number of concepts they occur in ("distinctiveness/sharedness") and likelihood of co-occurrence ("correlational…
Descriptors: Oral Language, Semantics, Concept Mapping, Statistics
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Reilly, Jamie; Hung, Jinyi; Westbury, Chris – Cognitive Science, 2017
Arbitrary symbolism is a linguistic doctrine that predicts an orthogonal relationship between word forms and their corresponding meanings. Recent corpora analyses have demonstrated violations of arbitrary symbolism with respect to concreteness, a variable characterizing the sensorimotor salience of a word. In addition to qualitative semantic…
Descriptors: Computational Linguistics, Semantics, Word Recognition, Auditory Perception
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Fedorenko, Evelina; Piantadosi, Steve; Gibson, Edward – Cognitive Science, 2012
Results from two self-paced reading experiments in English are reported in which subject- and object-extracted relative clauses (SRCs and ORCs, respectively) were presented in contexts that support both types of relative clauses (RCs). Object-extracted versions were read more slowly than subject-extracted versions across both experiments. These…
Descriptors: Semantics, Priming, Short Term Memory, Nouns
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Ibbotson, Paul; Theakston, Anna L.; Lieven, Elena V. M.; Tomasello, Michael – Cognitive Science, 2012
This paper investigates whether an abstract linguistic construction shows the kind of prototype effects characteristic of non-linguistic categories, in both adults and young children. Adapting the prototype-plus-distortion methodology of Franks and Bransford (1971), we found that whereas adults were lured toward false-positive recognition of…
Descriptors: Semantics, Adults, Young Children, Recognition (Psychology)
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