Concrete symbols (e.g., "sun," "run") can be learned in the context of objects and actions, thereby grounding their meaning in the world. However, it is controversial whether a comparable avenue to semantic learning exists for abstract symbols (e.g., "democracy"). When we simulated the putative brain mechanisms of…

We investigate the articulation between domain-general reasoning and interpretive processes in failures of deductive reasoning. We focus on illusory inferences from disjunction-like elements, a broad class of deductive fallacies studied in some detail over the past 15 years. These fallacies have received accounts grounded in reasoning processes,…

The comprehension of connectives is crucial for understanding the discourse relations that make up a text. We studied connective comprehension in English to investigate whether adult comprehenders acquire the meaning and intended use of connectives to a similar extent and how connective features and individual differences impact connective…

In the property listing task (PLT), participants are asked to list properties for a concept (e.g., for the concept "dog," "barks," and "is a pet" may be produced). In conceptual property norming (CPNs) studies, participants are asked to list properties for large sets of concepts. Here, we use a mathematical model of…

Semantic is associated with the relationship between symbol, reference, and the problem's context involved in the problem-solving process which also involves reasoning and decision-making. Hence, this study describes the characteristics of students' semantic reasoning to solve the double discounts problem. 51 high school students in Sidoarjo…

When young children learn to use language, they start to use their hands in co-verbal gesturing. There are, however, considerable differences between children, and it is not completely understood what these individual differences are due to. We studied how children at 4 years of age employ speech and iconic gestures to convey meaning in different…

Describing the processes of metaphor comprehension has been a hot topic of discussion among researchers throughout the past four decades. One of the major challenges has been to find a mechanism that can describe the processes involved in the comprehension of various kinds of metaphors. This article suggests that different types of metaphors could…

Humans are sensitive to the properties of individual items, and exemplar models are useful for capturing this sensitivity. I am a proponent of an extension of exemplar-based architectures that I briefly describe. However, exemplar models are very shallow architectures in which it is necessary to stipulate a set of primitive elements that make up…

This commentary critiques Ambridge's radical exemplar model of language acquisition using research from the Longitudinal Study of Early Language, which has tracked the language development of 30+ children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) since 2002. This research has demonstrated that the children's capacity for abstraction at the grammatical…

Abstraction is a core principle of Distributional Semantic Models (DSMs) that learn semantic representations for words by applying dimensional reduction to statistical redundancies in language. Although the posited learning mechanisms vary widely, virtually all DSMs are prototype models in that they create a single abstract representation of a…

Reflexivity refers to the capacity for individuals to understand the cultural system and manage their own position within it. Reflexivity is a key concept in the understanding of intercultural communication, particularly in recognising the ability for individuals to understand and adapt to new cultural contexts. However, the prevailing methods…

In the context of an analytical geometry, this study considers the mathematical understanding and activity of seven students analyzed simultaneously through two knowledge frameworks: (1) the Van Hiele levels (Van Hiele, 1986, 1999) and register and domain knowledge (Hibert, 1988); and (2) three action frameworks: the SOLO taxonomy (Biggs, 1999;…

The goal of this article is to make the case for a radical exemplar account of child language acquisition, under which unwitnessed forms are produced and comprehended by on-the-fly analogy across multiple stored exemplars, weighted by their degree of similarity to the target with regard to the task at hand. Across the domains of (1) word meanings,…

The Abstract Conceptual Feature (ACF) framework predicts that word meaning is represented within a high-dimensional semantic space bounded by weighted contributions of perceptual, affective, and encyclopedic information. The ACF, like latent semantic analysis, is amenable to distance metrics between any two words. We applied predictions of the ACF…

We introduce a novel measure of abstractness based on the amount of information of a concept computed from its position in a semantic taxonomy. We refer to this measure as "precision". We propose two alternative ways to measure precision, one based on the path length from a concept to the root of the taxonomic tree, and another one based…