Reports on a study of how people create names for individuals characterized by role descriptions. Concludes that context scenarios that involved the individual denoted by a role description elicited names less literally based on the actual role description than did less involving scenarios, and that less literal names appeared to directly…

Describes a computational model of high-dimensional context space: the Hyperspace Analog to Language (HAL). Shows that HAL provides sufficient information to make semantic, grammatical, and abstract distinctions. Demonstrates the cognitive compatibility of the representations with human processing; and introduces a new methodology that extracts…

Offers an introduction to the theory and implementation of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words by statistical computations applied to a large corpus of text. Gives an overview of applications and modeling of human knowledge to which LSA has been applied. (SR)

Comments on several quantitative approaches to semantic knowledge representations (the focus of this special issue). Points out some of the ways in which Latent Semantic Analysis and Hyperspace Analog to Language fall short of being plausible theories about psychological reality. Examines in-principle failures and wrong-kind failures that arise in…

Assesses three papers in this volume, those by Wellman and Estes, Olson and Torrance, and Hall and Nagy, for their treatment of the following: (1) definition of semantic space, (2) defining children's processes of understanding that space, and (3) describing the contexts in which cognitive language is used. (AEW)

Discusses focusing, the manner in which speakers center attention on a particular element of discourse, and describes a process model of focusing that specifies what syntactic, semantic, and world knowledge constraints are needed for a hearer to track a speaker's focus in a discourse. (FL)

Illustrates use of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) for predicting coherence through reanalyzing two studies that manipulated coherence of texts and assessed readers' comprehension. Finds that LSA predicts effects of text coherence on comprehension. Notes that LSA can be applied as an automated method that produces coherence predictions similar to…

Compares semantic uses of mental state words by children four and a half to five years old. Suggests that children's linguistic and cognitive capacities can be influenced a great deal by subtle situational factors and that the effects vary according to the child's cultural background. (AEW)

Proposes a top-down procedural model for the dynamic extraction and use of context structure to resolve references. (FL)

Critically examines papers by Wellman and Estes, Olson and Torrance, and Hall and Nagy. (AEW)