CiteULike: briordan's library [816 articles]

A semantic network of English verbs

Christiane Fellbaum — 2008-07-02T03:27:13-00:00

(1998), pp. 69-104.

Approximate Lexicography and Web Search

Kenneth Church — 2008-06-28T12:15:56-00:00

Int J Lexicography (27 June 2008), ecn022.

The term approximate lexicography' was introduced by Grefenstette (1998) as a promising way forward--a third way--between warring factions in linguistics (Chomsky 1957) and engineering (Brown et al. 1992). Like most compromises, this one is not perfect, but not bad. Grefenstette attributed approximate lexicography to several people, including Adam Kilgarriff, Jeremy Clear and myself, but in fact, my generation came to this position only after years of persuasive arguments by John Sinclair. 10.1093/ijl/ecn022

Geometry and Meaning

Dominic Widdows — 2008-06-26T14:28:52-00:00

(2004)

Automated Content Assessment of Text Using Latent Semantic Analysis to Simulate Human Cognition

Darrell Laham — 2008-06-26T13:55:23-00:00

(2000)

Bootstrapping word order in prelexical infants: A Japanese-Italian cross-linguistic study

Judit Gervain — 2008-06-24T10:59:35-00:00

Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 57, No. 1. (August 2008), pp. 56-74.

Learning word order is one of the earliest feats infants accomplish during language acquisition [Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.]. Two theories have been proposed to account for this fact. Constructivist/lexicalist theories [Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition, 74(3), 209-253.] argue that word order is learned separately for each lexical item or construction. Generativist theories [Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.], on the other hand, claim that word order is an abstract and general property, determined from the input independently of individual words. Here, we show that eight-month-old Japanese and Italian infants have opposite order preferences in an artificial grammar experiment, mirroring the opposite word orders of their respective native languages. This suggests that infants possess some representation of word order prelexically, arguing for the generativist view. We propose a frequency-based bootstrapping mechanism to account for our results, arguing that infants might build this representation by tracking the order of functors and content words, identified through their different frequency distributions. We investigate frequency and word order patterns in infant-directed Japanese and Italian corpora to support this claim.

Infant speech perception bootstraps word learning

Janet Werker — 2006-06-14T17:12:10-00:00

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 9, No. 11. (November 2005), pp. 519-527.

By their first birthday, infants can understand many spoken words. Research in cognitive development has long focused on the conceptual changes that accompany word learning, but learning new words also entails perceptual sophistication. Several developmental steps are required as infants learn to segment, identify and represent the phonetic forms of spoken words, and map those word forms to different concepts. We review recent research on how infants' perceptual systems unfold in the service of word learning, from initial sensitivity for speech to the learning of language-specific sound patterns. Building on a recent theoretical framework and emerging new methodologies, we show how speech perception is crucial for word learning, and suggest that it bootstraps the development of a separate but parallel phonological system that links sound to meaning.

Neural Substrates of Language Acquisition

Patricia Kuhl — 2008-06-18T12:15:57-00:00

Annual Review of Neuroscience, Vol. 31, No. 1. (2008), pp. 511-534.

Infants learn language(s) with apparent ease, and the tools of modern neuroscience are providing valuable information about the mechanisms that underlie this capacity. Noninvasive, safe brain technologies have now been proven feasible for use with children starting at birth. The past decade has produced an explosion in neuroscience research examining young children's processing of language at the phonetic, word, and sentence levels. At all levels of language, the neural signatures of learning can be documented at remarkably early points in development. Individual continuity in linguistic development from infants' earliest responses to phonemes is reflected in infants' language abilities in the second and third year of life, a finding with theoretical and clinical implications. Developmental neuroscience studies using language are beginning to answer questions about the origins of humans' language faculty.

NLS: A non-latent similarity algorithm

Zhiqiang Cai — 2008-06-16T00:11:17-00:00

(2004), pp. 180-185.

Focusing on the relation: fewer exemplars facilitate children's initial verb learning and extension

Mandy Maguire — 2008-06-14T11:52:00-00:00

Developmental Science, Vol. 11, No. 4. (2008), pp. 628-634.

Abstract One of the most prominent theories for why children struggle to learn verbs is that verb learning requires the abstraction of relations between an object and its action ( Gentner, 2003). Two hypotheses suggest how children extract relations to extend a novel verb: (1) seeing many different exemplars allows children to detect the invariant relation between actions in different contexts ( Gentner, 2003), and (2) repetition of fewer exemplars allows children to move beyond the entities involved to extract the relation ( Kersten & Smith, 2002). We tested - and 3-year-olds’ ability to extend a novel verb after viewing the repetition of one novel actor compared to four different actors performing a novel action. Both ages were better at learning and extending a novel verb to a novel actor when shown only one actor rather than four different actors. These results indicate that during initial verb learning less information is more effective.

Cultural route to the emergence of linguistic categories

Andrea Puglisi — 2008-06-03T20:48:15-00:00

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (3 June 2008), 0802485105.

Categories provide a coarse-grained description of the world. A fundamental question is whether categories simply mirror an underlying structure of nature or instead come from the complex interactions of human beings among themselves and with the environment. Here, we address this question by modeling a population of individuals who co-evolve their own system of symbols and meanings by playing elementary language games. The central result is the emergence of a hierarchical category structure made of two distinct levels: a basic layer, responsible for fine discrimination of the environment, and a shared linguistic layer that groups together perceptions to guarantee communicative success. Remarkably, the number of linguistic categories turns out to be finite and small, as observed in natural languages. 10.1073/pnas.0802485105

A critique of Mark D. Allen's "The preservation of verb subcategory knowledge in a spoken language comprehension deficit"

David Kemmerer — 2008-06-10T01:07:47-00:00

Brain and Language, Vol. 106, No. 1. (July 2008), pp. 72-78.

Allen [Allen, M. (2005). The preservation of verb subcategory knowledge in a spoken language comprehension deficit. Brain and Language, 95, 255-264.] reports a single patient, WBN, who, during spoken language comprehension, is still able to access some of the syntactic properties of verbs despite being unable to access some of their semantic properties. Allen claims that these findings challenge linguistic theories which assume that much of the syntactic behavior of verbs can be predicted from their meanings. I argue, however, that this conclusion is not supported by the data for two reasons: first, Allen focuses on aspects of verb syntax that are not claimed to be influenced by verb semantics; and second, he ignores aspects of verb syntax that are claimed to be influenced by verb semantics.

The similarity-in-topography principle: Reconciling theories of conceptual deficits

Kyle Simmons — 2008-06-09T23:06:57-00:00

Cognitive Neuropsychology, Vol. 20, No. 3. (2003), pp. 451-486.

Three theories currently compete to explain the conceptual deficits that result from brain damage: sensory-functional theory, domain-specific theory, and conceptual structure theory. We argue that all three theories capture important aspects of conceptual deficits, and offer different insights into their origins. Conceptual topography theory (CTT) integrates these insights, beginning with A. R. Damasio's (1989) convergence zone theory and elaborating it with the similarity-in-topography (SIT) principle. According to CTT, feature maps in sensory-motor systems represent the features of a category's exemplars. A hierarchical system of convergence zones then conjoins these features to form both property and category representations. According to the SIT principle, the proximity of two conjunctive neurons in a convergence zone increases with the similarity of the features they conjoin. As a result, conjunctive neurons become topographically organised into local regions that represent properties and categories. Depending on the level and location of a lesion in this system, a wide variety of deficits is possible. Consistent with the literature, these deficits range from the loss of a single category to the loss of multiple categories that share sensory-motor properties.

Are there lexicons?

Max Coltheart — 2008-06-09T23:03:04-00:00

The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A, Vol. 57, No. 7. (2004), pp. 1153-1171.

Many models of the processing of printed or spoken words or objects or faces propose that systems of local representations of the forms of such stimulilexiconsexist. This is denied by partisans of the distributed-representation connectionist approach to cognitive modelling. An experimental paradigm of key theoretical importance here is lexical decision and its analogue in the domain of objects, object decision. How does each theoretical camp account for our ability to perform these two tasks? The localists say that the tasks are done by matching or failing to match a stimulus to a local representation in a lexicon. Advocates of distributed representations often do not seek to explain these two tasks; however, when they do, they propose that patterns of activation evoked in a semantic system can be used to discriminate between words and nonwords, or between real objects and false objects. Therefore the distributed-representation account of lexical and object decision tasks predicts that performance on these tasks can never be normal in patients with an impaired semantic system, nor in patients who cannot access semantics normally from the stimulus domain being tested. However, numerous such patients have been reported in the literature, indicating that semantic access is not needed for normal performance on these tasks. Such results support the localist form of modelling rather than the distributed-representation approach.

An Efficient, Probabilistically Sound Algorithm for Segmentation and Word Discovery

Michael Brent — 2008-06-08T18:10:36-00:00

Machine Learning, Vol. 34, No. 1. (1 February 1999), pp. 71-105.

This paper presents a model-based, unsupervised algorithm for recovering word boundaries in a natural-language text from which they have been deleted. The algorithm is derived from a probability model of the source that generated the text. The fundamental structure of the model is specified abstractly so that the detailed component models of phonology, word-order, and word frequency can be replaced in a modular fashion. The model yields a language-independent, prior probability distribution on all possible sequences of all possible words over a given alphabet, based on the assumption that the input was generated by concatenating words from a fixed but unknown lexicon. The model is unusual in that it treats the generation of a complete corpus, regardless of length, as a single event in the probability space. Accordingly, the algorithm does not estimate a probability distribution on words; instead, it attempts to calculate the prior probabilities of various word sequences that could underlie the observed text. Experiments on phonemic transcripts of spontaneous speech by parents to young children suggest that our algorithm is more effective than other proposed algorithms, at least when utterance boundaries are given and the text includes a substantial number of short utterances.

Bigrams and the Richness of the Stimulus

Xuân-Nga Kam — 2008-06-07T20:14:50-00:00

Cognitive Science: A Multidisciplinary Journal, Vol. 32, No. 4. (2008), pp. 771-787.

Recent challenges to Chomsky's <i>poverty of the stimulus</i> thesis for language acquisition suggest that children's primary data may carry indirect evidence about linguistic constructions despite containing no instances of them. Indirect evidence is claimed to suffice for grammar acquisition, without need for innate knowledge. This article reports experiments based on those of Reali and Christiansen (2005), who demonstrated that a simple bigram language model can induce the correct form of auxiliary inversion in certain complex questions. This article investigates the nature of the indirect evidence that supports this learning, and assesses how reliably it is available. Results confirm the original finding for one specific sentence type but show that the model's success is highly circumscribed. It performs poorly on inversion in related constructions in English and Dutch. Because other, more powerful statistical models have so far been shown to succeed only on the same limited subset of cases as the bigram model, it remains to be seen whether stimulus richness can be substantiated more generally.

How features create knowledge of kinds

Shohei Hidaka — 2008-06-06T18:28:40-00:00

(2008)

The Influence of Grammatical, Local, and Organizational Redundancy on Implicit Learning: An Analysis Using Information Theory

Randall Jamieson — 2008-06-05T17:53:58-00:00

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol. 31, No. 1. (January 2005), pp. 9-23.

Nonparametric Bayesian Models of Lexical Acquisition

Sharon Goldwater — 2008-06-03T01:35:18-00:00

(2006)

Perception and presupposition in real-time language comprehension: Insights from anticipatory processing

Craig Chambers — 2008-04-14T12:32:44-00:00

Cognition, Vol. In Press, Corrected Proof

Recent studies have shown that listeners use verbs and other predicate terms to anticipate reference to semantic entities during real-time language comprehension. This process involves evaluating the denoted action against relevant properties of potential referents. The current study explored whether action-relevant properties are readily available to comprehension systems as a result of the embodied nature of linguistic and conceptual representations. In three experiments, eye movements were monitored as listeners followed instructions to move depicted objects on a computer screen. Critical instructions contained the verb return (e.g., Now return the block to area 3), which presupposes the previous displacement of its complement object - a property that is not reflected in perceptible or stable characteristics of objects. Experiment 1 demonstrated that predictions for previously displaced objects are generated upon hearing return, ruling out the possibility that anticipatory effects draw directly on static affordances in perceptual symbols. Experiment 2 used a referential communication task to evaluate how communicative relevance constrains the use of perceptually derived information. Results showed that listeners anticipate previously displaced objects as candidates upon hearing return only when their displacement was known to the speaker. Experiment 3 showed that the outcome of the original act of displacement further modulates referential predictions. The results show that the use of perceptually grounded information in language interpretation is subject to communicative constraints, even when language denotes physical actions performed on concrete objects.

Infant Pathways to Language: Methods, Models, and Research Directions

2008-05-30T12:53:41-00:00

(2008)

Universal Grammar, statistics or both?

Charles Yang — 2008-05-29T16:20:41-00:00

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 8, No. 10. (October 2004), pp. 451-456.

Recent demonstrations of statistical learning in infants have reinvigorated the innateness versus learning debate in language acquisition. This article addresses these issues from both computational and developmental perspectives. First, I argue that statistical learning using transitional probabilities cannot reliably segment words when scaled to a realistic setting (e.g. child-directed English). To be successful, it must be constrained by knowledge of phonological structure. Then, turning to the bona fide theory of innateness - the Principles and Parameters framework - I argue that a full explanation of children's grammar development must abandon the domain-specific learning model of triggering, in favor of probabilistic learning mechanisms that might be domain-general but nevertheless operate in the domain-specific space of syntactic parameters.

Form is easy, meaning is hard: resolving a paradox in early child language

Letitia Naigles — 2008-05-29T16:14:51-00:00

Cognition, Vol. 86, No. 2. (December 2002), pp. 157-199.

A developmental paradox is discussed: studies of infant processing of language and language-like stimuli indicate considerable ability to abstract patterns over specific items and to distinguish natural from unnatural English sentences. In contrast, studies of toddler language production find little ability to generalize patterns over specific English words or constructions. Thus, infants appear to be abstract auditory or language processors whereas toddlers appear to be non-abstract, item-specific language users. Three resolutions are offered to this paradox. The first, that no resolution is necessary because only the toddler findings come from language use in a communicative context and so only the toddler findings are relevant to linguistic knowledge, is rejected. The second, that the contradictions are rooted in the differing methodologies of the two sets of studies (comprehension vs. production), is found to explain important aspects of the contradictory findings. The third, that the contractions come from the differing content of the stimuli in the studies, is also found to be explanatory and is argued to carry greater weight. Resolution 3 suggests that the patterns that infants extract from their linguistic input are not yet tied to meaning; thus, toddlers do not lose these earlier-abstracted forms but their use of them is limited until they have been integrated with meaning. It is argued that in language acquisition, learning form is easy but learning meaning, and especially linking meanings and forms, is hard.

Neuroanatomical distribution of five semantic components of verbs: Evidence from fMRI

David Kemmerer — 2008-05-29T15:10:21-00:00

Brain and Language, Vol. In Press, Corrected Proof

The Simulation Framework, also known as the Embodied Cognition Framework, maintains that conceptual knowledge is grounded in sensorimotor systems. To test several predictions that this theory makes about the neural substrates of verb meanings, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan subjects' brains while they made semantic judgments involving five classes of verbs--specifically, Running verbs (e.g., run, jog, walk), Speaking verbs (e.g., shout, mumble, whisper), Hitting verbs (e.g., hit, poke, jab), Cutting verbs (e.g., cut, slice, hack), and Change of State verbs (e.g., shatter, smash, crack). These classes were selected because they vary with respect to the presence or absence of five distinct semantic components--specifically, ACTION, MOTION, CONTACT, CHANGE OF STATE, and TOOL USE. Based on the Simulation Framework, we hypothesized that the ACTION component depends on the primary motor and premotor cortices, that the MOTION component depends on the posterolateral temporal cortex, that the CONTACT component depends on the intraparietal sulcus and inferior parietal lobule, that the CHANGE OF STATE component depends on the ventral temporal cortex, and that the TOOL USE component depends on a distributed network of temporal, parietal, and frontal regions. Virtually all of the predictions were confirmed. Taken together, these findings support the Simulation Framework and extend our understanding of the neuroanatomical distribution of different aspects of verb meaning.

Defusing the Childhood Vocabulary Explosion

Bob Mcmurray — 2008-05-27T23:57:15-00:00

Number

Greville Corbett — 2008-05-27T15:26:09-00:00

(2000)

Corpora in Language Acquisition

2008-05-25T11:39:59-00:00

(2008)

Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words? The Flexible Nature of Modality Dominance in Young Children

Amanda Napolitano — 2004-12-28T18:09:51-00:00

Child Development, Vol. 75, No. 6. (2004), pp. 1850-1870.

Compositionality and Statistics in Adjective Acquisition: 4-Year-Olds Interpret Tall and Short Based on the Size Distributions of Novel Noun Referents

David Barner — 2008-05-17T00:13:45-00:00

Child Development, Vol. 79, No. 3. (2008), pp. 594-608.

Four experiments investigated 4-year-olds’ understanding of adjective-noun compositionality and their sensitivity to statistics when interpreting scalar adjectives. In Experiments 1 and 2, children selected tall and short items from 9 novel objects called pimwits (1-9 in. in height) or from this array plus 4 taller or shorter distractor objects of the same kind. Changing the height distributions of the sets shifted children’s tall and short judgments. However, when distractors differed in name and surface features from targets, in Experiment 3, judgments did not shift. In Experiment 4, dissimilar distractors did affect judgments when they received the same name as targets. It is concluded that 4-year-olds deploy a compositional semantics that is sensitive to statistics and mediated by linguistic labels.

Prior knowledge and exemplar frequency

Harlan Harris — 2008-05-15T17:19:55-00:00

(submitted)

Statistical approaches to language acquisition and the self-organizing consciousness: a reversal of perspective

Pierre Perruchet — 2008-05-13T19:43:05-00:00

Psychological Research, Vol. 69, No. 5. (1 June 2005), pp. 316-329.

Recent years have seen the upsurge of a new approach to language that moves away from the rule-based conventional framework. In this approach, mostly supported by the success of connectionist models, children learn language by exploiting the distributional properties of the input. It is argued in this paper that, in the same way as conforming to rules does not imply the existence of mental rules, conforming to statistical regularities does not imply that statistical computations are performed mentally. Sensitivity to statistical regularities can alternatively be conceived of as a by-product of the recurrent interplay between the properties of the current conscious content and the properties of the linguistic and extralinguistic environment. The validity of including the content of conscious experiences in an otherwise standard dynamical approach rooted in the notion of self-organization is discussed.

Combining classifiers for word sense disambiguation based on Dempster-Shafer theory and OWA operators

Cuong Le — 2008-05-12T02:03:21-00:00

Data & Knowledge Engineering, Vol. 63, No. 2. (November 2007), pp. 381-396.

In this paper, we discuss a framework for weighted combination of classifiers for word sense disambiguation (WSD). This framework is essentially based on Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence [G. Shafer, A Mathematical Theory of Evidence, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1976] and ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operators [R.R. Yager, On ordered weighted averaging aggregation operators in multicriteria decision making, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 18 (1988) 183-190] We first determine various kinds of features which could provide complementarily linguistic information for the context, and then combine these sources of information based on Dempster's rule of combination and OWA operators for identifying the meaning of a polysemous word. We experimentally design a set of individual classifiers, each of which corresponds to a distinct representation type of context considered in the WSD literature, and then the discussed combination strategies are tested and compared on English lexical samples of Senseval-2 and Senseval-3.

Comparing the University of South Florida Homograph Norms with Empirical Corpus Data

Reinhard Rapp — 2008-05-10T00:53:21-00:00

Data Analysis, Machine Learning and Applications (2008), pp. 611-618.

The basis for most classification algorithms dealing with word sense induction and word sense disambiguation is the assumption that certain context words are typical of a particular sense of an ambiguous word. However, as such algorithms have been only moderately successful in the past, the question that we raise here is if this assumption really holds. Starting with an inventory of predefined senses and sense descriptors taken from the University of South Florida Homograph Norms, we present a quantitative study of the distribution of these descriptors in a large corpus. Hereby, our focus is on the comparison of co-occurrence frequencies between descriptors belonging to the same versus to different senses, and to the effects of considering groups of descriptors rather than single descriptors. Our findings are that descriptors belonging to the same sense co-occur significantly more often than descriptors belonging to different senses, and that considering groups of descriptors effectively reduces the otherwise serious problem of data sparseness.

Data Manipulation with R

Phil Spector — 2008-05-10T00:49:40-00:00

(2008)

What with? The Anatomy of a (Proto)-Role

Jean-Pierre Koenig — 2008-05-07T16:06:39-00:00

J Semantics, Vol. 25, No. 2. (1 May 2008), pp. 175-220.

This paper describes a comprehensive survey of English verbs that semantically allow or require an Instrument role. It sheds light on the nature of Instrument roles and instrumentality by examining the distribution in semantic space of those verbs. We show first that verbs that semantically require instruments are typically semantically more complex than predicted by current theories of the structural complexity of verb meanings. We also show that verbs that require or allow instruments constrain the end states of situations they describe more than they constrain the agent's initial activity. Our survey further suggests that the causal role played by the instrument is more varied than suggested by previous studies and requires the introduction of a new subtype of causal relation, which we dub helping. Finally, our survey demonstrates that verbs that semantically require an instrument cluster together more closely in semantic space and constrain the instrument's (causal) role and properties more than verbs that merely allow the presence of an instrument. 10.1093/jos/ffm013

ASTEF: A simple tool for examining fixations

Camilli — 2008-04-21T19:04:02-00:00

Behavior Research Methods, Vol. 40, No. 2. (May 2008), pp. 373-382.

Rules and exemplars in category learning

Michael Erickson — 2008-04-30T13:44:42-00:00

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Vol. 127, No. 2. (June 1998), pp. 107-140.

The link between statistical segmentation and word learning in adults

Daniel Mirman — 2008-04-22T01:09:39-00:00

Cognition, Vol. 108, No. 1. (July 2008), pp. 271-280.

Many studies have shown that listeners can segment words from running speech based on conditional probabilities of syllable transitions, suggesting that this statistical learning could be a foundational component of language learning. However, few studies have shown a direct link between statistical segmentation and word learning. We examined this possible link in adults by following a statistical segmentation exposure phase with an artificial lexicon learning phase. Participants were able to learn all novel object-label pairings, but pairings were learned faster when labels contained high probability (word-like) or non-occurring syllable transitions from the statistical segmentation phase than when they contained low probability (boundary-straddling) syllable transitions. This suggests that, for adults, labels inconsistent with expectations based on statistical learning are harder to learn than consistent or neutral labels. In contrast, a previous study found that infants learn consistent labels, but not inconsistent or neutral labels.

From simple associations to the building blocks of language: Modeling meaning in memory with the HAL model

Curt Burgess — 2008-04-18T00:44:15-00:00

Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, Vol. 30, No. 2. (1998), pp. 188-198.

Knowledge, Concepts, and Categories

2008-04-09T17:54:48-00:00

(1997)

PUTOP: Turning predominant senses into a topic model for word sense disambiguation

Jordan Boyd-Graber — 2008-04-05T19:52:07-00:00

A topic model for word sense disambiguation

Jordan Boyd-Graber — 2008-04-05T19:47:19-00:00

(2007)

Bilingualism in infancy: first steps in perception and comprehension

Janet Werker — 2008-04-02T00:44:07-00:00

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 12, No. 4. (April 2008), pp. 144-151.

Many children grow up in bilingual families and acquire two first languages. Emerging research is advancing the view that the capacity to acquire language can be applied equally to two languages as to one but that bilingual and monolingual acquisition nonetheless differ in some nontrivial ways. To probe the first steps toward acquisition, researchers recently have begun to use experimental methods to study preverbal bilingual infants. We review the literature in this growing field, focusing on how infants growing up bilingual use surface acoustic information to separate, categorize and begin to learn their two languages. These new data invite the expansion of standard linguistic theories to account for how a single architecture can support the acquisition of two languages simultaneously.

From the Cover: Intuitive statistics by 8-month-old infants

Fei Xu — 2008-04-01T17:43:37-00:00

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 105, No. 13. (1 April 2008), pp. 5012-5015.

Human learners make inductive inferences based on small amounts of data: we generalize from samples to populations and vice versa. The academic discipline of statistics formalizes these intuitive statistical inferences. What is the origin of this ability? We report six experiments investigating whether 8-month-old infants are "intuitive statisticians." Our results showed that, given a sample, the infants were able to make inferences about the population from which the sample had been drawn. Conversely, given information about the entire population of relatively small size, the infants were able to make predictions about the sample. Our findings provide evidence that infants possess a powerful mechanism for inductive learning, either using heuristics or basic principles of probability. This ability to make inferences based on samples or information about the population develops early and in the absence of schooling or explicit teaching. Human infants may be rational learners from very early in development. 10.1073/pnas.0704450105

A distributional model of semantic context effects in lexical processing

Scott Mcdonald — 2008-03-23T02:50:16-00:00

Cogprints (2002)

A distributional model of semantic context effects in lexical processing

Scott Mcdonald — 2008-03-23T01:59:50-00:00

(2004)

Rational statistical inference and cognitive development

Fei Xu — 2008-03-23T01:13:42-00:00

The Text Mining Handbook: Advanced Approaches to Analyzing Unstructured Data

Ronen Feldman — 2008-03-19T00:45:51-00:00

(2007)

The Different Neural Correlates of Action and Functional Knowledge in Semantic Memory: An fMRI Study

Nicola Canessa — 2008-03-12T00:47:20-00:00

Cereb. Cortex, Vol. 18, No. 4. (1 April 2008), pp. 740-751.

Previous reports suggest that the internal organization of semantic memory is in terms of different "types of knowledge," including "sensory" (information about perceptual features), "action" (motor-based knowledge of object utilization), and "functional" (abstract properties, as function and context of use). Consistent with this view, a specific loss of action knowledge, with preserved functional knowledge, has been recently observed in patients with left frontoparietal lesions. The opposite pattern (impaired functional knowledge with preserved action knowledge) was reported in association with anterior inferotemporal lesions. In the present study, the cerebral representation of action and functional knowledge was investigated using event-related analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging data. Fifteen subjects were presented with pictures showing pairs of manipulable objects and asked whether the objects within each pair were used with the same manipulation pattern ("action knowledge" condition) or in the same context ("functional knowledge" condition). Direct comparisons showed action knowledge, relative to functional knowledge, to activate a left frontoparietal network, comprising the intraparietal sulcus, the inferior parietal lobule, and the dorsal premotor cortex. The reverse comparison yielded activations in the retrosplenial and the lateral anterior inferotemporal cortex. These results confirm and extend previous neuropsychological data and support the hypothesis of the existence of different types of information processing in the internal organization of semantic memory. 10.1093/cercor/bhm110

Learning domain structures

Charles Kemp — 2008-03-09T19:07:03-00:00

(2004)

Age of acquisition for naming and knowing: A new hypothesis

Elaine Funnell — 2008-03-07T17:16:34-00:00

The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol. 59, No. 2. (2006), pp. 268-295.

This paper reports an investigation into the age of acquisition of object names and object knowledge in a cross-sectional study of 288 children aged between 3 years 7 months and 11 years 6 months, comprising equal numbers of boys and girls. The objects belonged to four categories: animals, fruit and vegetables, implements, and vehicles. They were presented in three image types: line drawings, black-and-white photographs, and coloured photographs. In the knowledge test, five probe questions were asked for each object given the spoken name. Results showed that line drawings were more difficult to name than either black-and-white photographs or coloured photographs, which did not differ. The boys significantly out-performed the girls at naming and knowing, both overall and specifically for the category of vehicles. Naming and knowledge increased steadily with age but while young children below about 6 years 6 months showed an advantage to naming, older children showed an advantage to knowing. Similarly, age-of-acquisition measures for each item revealed a significant shift in the relationship between naming and knowing at around 80 months. We argue that differences in learning experience lead younger and older children to associate object names with different types of information, and we suggest that this difference probably accounts for the age-of-acquisition effects reported in adult object naming.