scholarly journals Conceptual Relations Predict Colexification across Languages

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yang Xu ◽  
dnk ◽  
Barbara Claire Malt ◽  
Serena Jiang ◽  
Mahesh Srinivasan

In natural language, multiple meanings often share a single word form, a phenomenon known as colexification. Some sets of meanings are more frequently colexified across languages than others, but the source of this variation is not well understood. We propose that cross-linguistic variation in colexification frequency is non-arbitrary and reflects a general principle of cognitive economy: More commonly colexified meanings across languages are those that require less cognitive effort to relate. To evaluate our proposal, we examine patterns of colexification of varying frequency from about 250 languages. We predict these colexification data based on independent measures of conceptual relatedness drawn from large-scale psychological and linguistic resources. Our results show that meanings that are more frequently colexified across these languages tend to be more strongly associated by speakers of English, suggesting that conceptual associativity provides an important constraint on the development of the lexicon. Our work extends research on polysemy and the evolution of word meanings by grounding cross-linguistic regularities in colexification in basic principles of human cognition.

The success of the Program of housing stock renovation in Moscow depends on the efficiency of resource management. One of the main urban planning documents that determine the nature of the reorganization of residential areas included in the Program of renovation is the territory planning project. The implementation of the planning project is a complex process that has a time point of its beginning and end, and also includes a set of interdependent parallel-sequential activities. From an organizational point of view, it is convenient to use network planning and management methods for project implementation. These methods are based on the construction of network models, including its varieties – a Gantt chart. A special application has been developed to simulate the implementation of planning projects. The article describes the basic principles and elements of modeling. The list of the main implementation parameters of the Program of renovation obtained with the help of the developed software for modeling is presented. The variants of using the results obtained for a comprehensive analysis of the implementation of large-scale urban projects are proposed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Suhail Matar ◽  
Julien Dirani ◽  
Alec Marantz ◽  
Liina Pylkkänen

AbstractDuring language comprehension, the brain processes not only word meanings, but also the grammatical structure—the “syntax”—that strings words into phrases and sentences. Yet the neural basis of syntax remains contentious, partly due to the elusiveness of experimental designs that vary structure independently of meaning-related variables. Here, we exploit Arabic’s grammatical properties, which enable such a design. We collected magnetoencephalography (MEG) data while participants read the same noun-adjective expressions with zero, one, or two contiguously-written definite articles (e.g., ‘chair purple’; ‘the-chair purple’; ‘the-chair the-purple’), representing equivalent concepts, but with different levels of syntactic complexity (respectively, indefinite phrases: ‘a purple chair’; sentences: ‘The chair is purple.’; definite phrases: ‘the purple chair’). We expected regions processing syntax to respond differently to simple versus complex structures. Single-word controls (‘chair’/‘purple’) addressed definiteness-based accounts. In noun-adjective expressions, syntactic complexity only modulated activity in the left posterior temporal lobe (LPTL), ~ 300 ms after each word’s onset: indefinite phrases induced more MEG-measured positive activity. The effects disappeared in single-word tokens, ruling out non-syntactic interpretations. In contrast, left anterior temporal lobe (LATL) activation was driven by meaning. Overall, the results support models implicating the LPTL in structure building and the LATL in early stages of conceptual combination.


2018 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 03006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bekzhan Mukatov ◽  
Ravil Khabibullin

The article describes the main factors determining the development of renewable energy sources in the world. The assessment of the applicability of foreign RES development strategies to Kazakhstan’s energy system has been made. The main tasks facing Kazakhstan’s energy system with large-scale implementation of renewable energy were formulated. On the basis of the analysis and performed calculations recommendations and basic principles have been made on development strategy of renewable energy sources in the Republic of Kazakhstan.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy N. Rubin ◽  
Oluwasanmi Koyejo ◽  
Krzysztof J. Gorgolewski ◽  
Michael N. Jones ◽  
Russell A. Poldrack ◽  
...  

AbstractA central goal of cognitive neuroscience is to decode human brain activity--i.e., to infer mental processes from observed patterns of whole-brain activation. Previous decoding efforts have focused on classifying brain activity into a small set of discrete cognitive states. To attain maximal utility, a decoding framework must be open-ended, systematic, and context-sensitive--i.e., capable of interpreting numerous brain states, presented in arbitrary combinations, in light of prior information. Here we take steps towards this objective by introducing a Bayesian decoding framework based on a novel topic model---Generalized Correspondence Latent Dirichlet Allocation---that learns latent topics from a database of over 11,000 published fMRI studies. The model produces highly interpretable, spatially-circumscribed topics that enable flexible decoding of whole-brain images. Importantly, the Bayesian nature of the model allows one to “seed” decoder priors with arbitrary images and text--enabling researchers, for the first time, to generative quantitative, context-sensitive interpretations of whole-brain patterns of brain activity.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Conrad Jackson ◽  
Joseph Watts ◽  
Johann-Mattis List ◽  
Ryan Drabble ◽  
Kristen Lindquist

Humans have been using language for thousands of years, but psychologists seldom consider what natural language can tell us about the mind. Here we propose that language offers a unique window into human cognition. After briefly summarizing the legacy of language analyses in psychological science, we show how methodological advances have made these analyses more feasible and insightful than ever before. In particular, we describe how two forms of language analysis—comparative linguistics and natural language processing—are already contributing to how we understand emotion, creativity, and religion, and overcoming methodological obstacles related to statistical power and culturally diverse samples. We summarize resources for learning both of these methods, and highlight the best way to combine language analysis techniques with behavioral paradigms. Applying language analysis to large-scale and cross-cultural datasets promises to provide major breakthroughs in psychological science.


2019 ◽  
Vol 484 (6) ◽  
pp. 655-658 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. I. Aptekarev ◽  
Yu. G. Rykov

The system of pressureless gas dynamics is a hydrodynamically justified generalization of the system consisting of the Burgers vector equation in the limit of vanishing viscosity and the mass conservation law. The latter system of equations was intensively used, in particular, in astrophysics to describe the large scale structure of the Universe. The solutions of the vector Burgers equation involve interesting dynamics of singularities, which can describe concentration processes. However, this dynamics does not satisfy the law of momentum conservation, which prevents us from treating it as dynamics of material objects. In this paper, momentum-conserving dynamics of singularities is investigated on the basis of the pressureless gas dynamics system. Such dynamics turns out to be more diverse and complex, but it is also possible to formulate a variational approach, for which the basic principles and relations are obtained in the work.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yang Xu ◽  
Barbara Claire Malt ◽  
Mahesh Srinivasan

One way that languages are able to communicate a potentially infinite set of ideas through a finite lexicon is by compressing emerging meanings into words, such that over time, individual words come to express multiple, related senses of meaning. We propose that overarching communicative and cognitive pressures have created systematic directionality in how new metaphorical senses have developed from existing word senses over the history of English. Given a large set of pairs of semantic domains, we used computational models to test which domains have been more commonly the starting points (source domains) and which the ending points (target domains) of metaphorical mappings over the past millennium. We found that a compact set of variables, including externality, embodiment, and valence, explain directionality in the majority of about 5000 metaphorical mappings recorded over the past 1100 years. These results provide the first large-scale historical evidence that metaphorical mapping is systematic, and driven by measurable communicative and cognitive principles.


1996 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 263-281
Author(s):  
Paul Loubere

The objective of this exercise set is to integrate knowledge from several scientific disciplines and learn something interesting about the way the world works. I want to use some basic principles from physics, biology, and geology to see how a large scale planetary process, the transport of heat over the earths surface, operates and has operated over time. This topic is of basic scientific interest, and it has real importance to the growing societal interest in global climate change. This applies whether natural variation in climate or human induced change are under discussion. The set of exercises that follows will examine how energy is absorbed by the earth from the sun; how and why this energy is distributed over the earth's surface; what controls energy distribution; how we can track the energy distributing process using the oceanic microfossil record; and what that record shows us about variation of heat distribution with time. This is an exercise in global climate change because the climate system is driven by the heat distribution process.


1998 ◽  
Vol 119-120 ◽  
pp. 79-89
Author(s):  
René Appel

Abstract It is often observed that minority children's lexical proficiency in the majority language lags behind that of majority children. This observations is substantiated by scores on vocabulary tests. However, in these (traditional) tests words are generally treated as having one meaning, while most words are polysemous, i.e. they have multiple meanings. A new test was designed to measure the knowledge of multiple word meanings of minority and majority children. Results pointed to a rather high correlation between the scores on a traditional vocabulary test and the newly developed test for the minority children. Furthermore, the minority children scored lower on the new test than the majority children, which suggests that they not only have a lexical deficit in their second language with respect to the number of words known, but also with respect to the number of meanings attached to each word.


2020 ◽  
pp. 107385842094597
Author(s):  
Lorenza S. Colzato ◽  
Bernhard Hommel ◽  
Christian Beste

Cognitive enhancement is becoming progressively popular as a subject of scientific investigation and by the public, although possible adverse effects are not sufficiently understood. We call for cognitive enhancement to build on more specific, mechanistic theories given that a-theoretical approaches to cognitive enhancement are both a cause and a consequence of a strong, if not exclusive focus on the benefits of procedures suited to enhance human cognition. We focus on downsides of cognitive enhancement and suggest that every attempt to enhance human cognition needs to deal with two basic principles: the neuro-competition principle and the nonlinearity principle. We discuss the possibility of both principles in light of recent attempts to improve human cognition by means of transcranial direct current stimulation, a well-established brain stimulation method, and clinically relevant nootropic drugs. We propose that much stronger emphasis on mechanistic theorizing is necessary in guiding future research on both the upsides and the downsides of cognitive enhancement.


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