Word Meaning

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What is the internal store of knowledge of words?
The mental lexicon, semantic memory- mental encyclopaedia
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What should the semantic theory explain?
How words relate to the world, lexical ambiguity, set inclusion, antonymy, Fido is a dog, Fido is an animal, theory of word meaning should be compatible with word meaning
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What is the definition of concept?
Determines how things are related and categorised, it is a mental representation of a particular category
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What is the definition of denotation?
The core, essential meaning of a word. It is the relation between the word and the class of objects to which it can refer
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What is the definition of connotation?
The secondary implications, or emotional or evaluative associations of a word
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What is problems with words meaning what they refer to?
Abstract concepts, dissociation between a word and things to which it can refer, (The evening star and morning star are both the planet venus
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What is the definition of sense?
Intension The content of the expression. Abstract specification that determines how a word is related in meaning to other words. It specifies the properties an object must have to be a member of the class
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What is the definition of reference?
Extension What the word stands for in the world, the reference of a sentence is it's truth value
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What is the feature theories?
Decompositional theory: Word meanings best described in terms of sets of bivalent semantic features of semantic markers
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What is the assumptions of the feature theories?
Word meaning can be decomposed into a finite set of primatives which are universal across languages
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Smith, Shoben and Rips (1974)
Defining features features an object must have, e.g., for 'bird': 'has a beak' and 'has wings' Characteristic features features possessed by most of a class of objects, e.g., 'flies' and 'builds a nest'
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What is the first type of semantic feature?
Intercorrelated features: Beaks - fly, tend to occur together living things tend to be represented by many intercorrelated features many members of a natural kind category will share intercorrelated features
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What is the second type of semantic feature?
Distinctive features (leopard has spots) enable us to distinguish among things exclusive to single items within a category artefacts tend to be represented by many distinguishing features
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What do distinguishing features hold?
A priviledged status in semantic memory
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What is the characteristics of the semantic network model?
Concepts represented by nodes in a network, Nodes joined together by links representing relations between concepts eg: Set membership, set inclusion, part whole, and property attribution
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What is the meaning of the word determined by?
The place the node in the network as a whole
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What is set inclusion link?
nets are hierarchically organised, semantic economy
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Hollen (1975)
Showed that simple semantic networks and feature theories were formally equivalent
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Rips, Smith and Shoben (1975)
Pointed out that formal equivalence does not imply psychological equivalence ie. different processing assumptions may results in more or less satisfactory performance models
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Wittgenstein (1953)
What set of necessary and sufficient conditions can be used to define the word 'game'? Concept of a 'game' is held together by an overlapping set of similarities between games like the similarities between members of a family.
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Rosch (1973)
Prototype theory derived from Wittgenstein's (1953) ideas about word meaning, i.e. most words cannot be defined in terms of sets of necessary and sufficient conditions. Instead, concepts/word meanings in natural languages tend to have a family resemb
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What is the prototype theory?
Concepts are centred around a representation of a prototypical member of the class, 'robin' Vs Ostrich for the concept 'bird'
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What is the meaning of a word?
is given by its prototype together with some specification of how far instances can differ from the prototype and still be a category member, i.e. 'bird'. Boundaries may often be 'fuzzy' rather than well-defined
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What does it explain?
Why sometimes the correct classification of an object is in doubt even when its features are not. Why some exemplars of a concept are more typical than other and come to mind more readily
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What is the sentence verification task?
Subjects asked to respond true or false to sentences of the following kind: Set Inclusion: 'A robin is a bird'; 'A whale is a fruit' and/or Property Attribution: 'A robin has feathers'; 'A whale has seeds
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WHat was the rationale?
Words presented in sentential context as in normal comprehension. Use of simple sentence frames to control differences in syntactic processing. Reaction times used to infer how knowledge about word meaning is stored/used in the process of comprehensi
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What is the principle of cognitive economy?
Information about concepts is stored at the highest appropriate level in the hierarchy, has feathers stored with bird rather than with each different exemplar such as robin or canary
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What do early studies confirm?
Predictions that sentence verification times would increase as distance in the hierarchy increased: A canary is an animal takes longer than a canary is a bird, a canary eats takes longer than a canary is yellow
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Collins and Quillian (1969)
Hierarchical model: Where one step is dependent upon completion of another step, the times are additive (S->P or S->S). Retrieval proceeds from one node in all directions at once (parallel). Average step time independent of levels
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Sentences used in experiment 1?
P0: 'A canary can sing' P1: 'A canary can fly' (1 level) P2: 'A canary has skin (2 levels)
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Landauer and Freedman (1968)
For both positive and negative instances recognition of category membership for large categories took longer than small categories, set inclusion (Animal set is larger than bird set so longer to search)
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Conrad (1972)
Cognitive economy only supported by Collins and Quillian. Maybe an artefact of hierarchies used in their experiments, failure to control for associations strengths
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What was the study?
Hierarhcies constructed using normative data for properties obtained from a large group of students
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Example sentences/
A banjo has strings, A sailboat has a mast, an oak has accorns
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What was found?
Property verification times can be explained in terms of differences in associative strength, i.e. association is stronger between 'canary' and 'yellow' than between 'canary' and 'feather
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What are the typicality effects?
Robin and ostrich both one level away from bird in hierarchy but easier to verify a robin is a bird than an ostrich is a bird
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Rips, Shoben and Smith (1973)
Contary to predictions based on dog-mammal-animal hierarchy, it is easier to verify a dog is an animal than a dog is a mammal
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What is the solution?
Uncommon or specialised concepts in the hierarchy can be by-passed by additional ISA links going directly from for example 'dog' to 'animal
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What?
Semantic judgements and lexical decision to pairs of nouns are affected by their relatedness (semantic distance)
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What is the spreading activation model?
Collins and loftus A non hierarchical model
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What is it based on?
Organised on the basis of semantic similarity, i.e. the number of properties that concepts share (the number of links between them
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What was found?
Search activity leads to activation of nodes searched with activation spreading outwards along strong associative links to activate other nodes. Spreading activation is automatic and not under the control of the language user. Activation=parallel
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What is semantic priming?
Spreading activation explains why words prime subsequent related words in lexical verification tasks (e.g. Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971), e.g., doctor - nurse vs. table - nurse
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What is between category typicality?
Move from organisation in terms of hierarchies to organisation in terms of associative strengths means that between-category typically effects (e.g. 'A dog is an animal' versus 'A dog is a mammal') is no longer a problem
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What are prototype effects according to the SAM?
Within-category typicality or prototype effects can be explained in terms of associative links of varying strength. e.g., between 'ostrich' and 'bird' and between 'robin' and 'bird
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Variability of negative judgement times?
Can be explained in terms of IS-NOT-A links of varying associative strength. Also explains why it takes longer to reject closely related items, e.g. 'A canary is an ostrich' versus 'A canary is a salmon
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What are the problem?
Proliferation of auxiliary assumptions about way information is accessed. Impossible to design an experiment to test underlying theory of representation
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What is distributional semantics?
Words with similar meanings are used in similar contexts
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Count models?
Latent-Semantic Analysis (LSA) Landauer & Dumais (1997), Landauer et al. (1997) - Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL) Lund & Burgess (1996)
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What is predictor models?
Predictor models - Continuous bag of words (CBOW) Mikolov et al., (2013)
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What is LSA?
count words in text passages (Paragraphs, documents, creates a N (ords X P (Paragraph) matrix
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What is HAL?
co-occurence of word pairs within a small sliding window size (e.g., 10 words) creates a N(words) x N(words) matrix)
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What is the continuous bag of words?
Predict target words based on context words. Method uses a neural network that learns from large corpora
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What does similarity measure?
Involves using the weights from input nodes to the hidden units of word pairs
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Mandera et al?
Used large dataset of semantic priming data (Hutchinson et al., 2013) to evaluate count and predict models. (e.g., lion - tiger vs. item - tiger
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What was the conclusion?
PRedict models are superior to count models
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What are the problems with distributional semantics?
meaning = relation with other words. How do we know the meaning of those words? Also a problem for prototype and semantic network theories
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What is the general problem of semnatic theories?
Grounding problem: What is the relation between abstract symbols and our knowledge, experiences, actions, and perceptions? No abstract representation of word meaning? or, Metaphors are used to represent abstract meanings (e.g. Lakoff & Johnson, 1980)
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What is the solution?
Grounding conceptual knowledge in modality specific systems
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Card 2

Front

What should the semantic theory explain?

Back

How words relate to the world, lexical ambiguity, set inclusion, antonymy, Fido is a dog, Fido is an animal, theory of word meaning should be compatible with word meaning

Card 3

Front

What is the definition of concept?

Back

Preview of the front of card 3

Card 4

Front

What is the definition of denotation?

Back

Preview of the front of card 4

Card 5

Front

What is the definition of connotation?

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Preview of the front of card 5
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