Learning about the Meanings of Ambiguous Words: Evidence from a Word-Meaning Priming Paradigm with Short Narratives

Fluent language comprehension requires readers and listeners to rapidly select an appropriate meaning for each word that they encounter. This meaning selection process is particularly challenging when low-frequency (subordinate) word meanings are used (e.g. the “river bank” meaning of “bank”). Recent word-meaning priming experiments show that recent experience can help to make subordinate word meanings more readily available, and thereby reduce the difficulty in accessing these meanings. One limitation of previous word-meaning priming experiments is that participants encounter the ambiguous words within a list of unconnected single sentences in which each ambiguous word is strongly disambiguated by words within the prime sentence. The current web-based study (N=51) extends this work to replicate word-meaning priming using short 3-sentence narratives as primes in which relatively weak contextual cues in sentence 1 serve to disambiguate a target ambiguous word that occurs in sentence 3. The results from the subsequent word-association test task confirmed that following a short delay (digit span) task the primed (subordinate) meanings were more readily available compared with an unprimed control. This work represents an important first step in moving the word-meaning priming paradigm towards materials that more reflect the varied ways in which ambiguous words are used within natural language.

Emotion norms for 6000 Polish word meanings with a direct mapping to the Polish wordnet

Emotion lexicons are useful in research across various disciplines, but the availability of such resources remains limited for most languages. While existing emotion lexicons typically comprise words, it is a particular meaning of a word (rather than the word itself) that conveys emotion. To mitigate this issue, we present the Emotion Meanings dataset, a novel dataset of 6000 Polish word meanings. The word meanings are derived from the Polish wordnet (plWordNet), a large semantic network interlinking words by means of lexical and conceptual relations. The word meanings were manually rated for valence and arousal, along with a variety of basic emotion categories (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, anticipation, happiness, surprise, and trust). The annotations were found to be highly reliable, as demonstrated by the similarity between data collected in two independent samples: unsupervised (n = 21,317) and supervised (n = 561). Although we found the annotations to be relatively stable for female, male, younger, and older participants, we share both summary data and individual data to enable emotion research on different demographically specific subgroups. The word meanings are further accompanied by the relevant metadata, derived from open-source linguistic resources. Direct mapping to Princeton WordNet makes the dataset suitable for research on multiple languages. Altogether, this dataset provides a versatile resource that can be employed for emotion research in psychology, cognitive science, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and natural language processing.

The forms and meanings of grammatical markers support efficient communication

Functionalist accounts of language suggest that forms are paired with meanings in ways that support efficient communication. Previous work on grammatical marking suggests that word forms have lengths that enable efficient production, and work on the semantic typology of the lexicon suggests that word meanings represent efficient partitions of semantic space. Here we establish a theoretical link between these two lines of work and present an information-theoretic analysis that captures how communicative pressures influence both form and meaning. We apply our approach to the grammatical features of number, tense, and evidentiality and show that the approach explains both which systems of feature values are attested across languages and the relative lengths of the forms for those feature values. Our approach shows that general information-theoretic principles can capture variation in both form and meaning across languages.

Social and emotion dimensional organizations in the abstract semantic space: the neuropsychological evidence

An essential aspect of human cognition is supported by a rich reservoir of abstract concepts without tangible external referents (e.g., “honor”, “relationship”, “direction”). While decades of research showed that the neural organization of conceptual knowledge referring to concrete words respects domains of evolutionary salience and sensorimotor attributes, the organization principles of abstract word meanings are poorly understood. Here, we provide neuropsychological evidence for a domain (sociality) and attribute (emotion) structure in abstract word processing. Testing 34 brain-damaged patients on a word-semantic judgment task, we observed double dissociations between social and nonsocial words and a single dissociation of sparing of emotional (relative to non-emotional) words. The lesion profiles of patients with specific dissociations suggest potential neural correlates positively or negatively associated with each dimension. These results unravel a general domain-attribute architecture of word meanings and highlight the roles of the social domain and the emotional attribute in the non-object semantic space.

Semantic Structure in Deep Learning

Deep learning has recently come to dominate computational linguistics, leading to claims of human-level performance in a range of language processing tasks. Like much previous computational work, deep learning–based linguistic representations adhere to the distributional meaning-in-use hypothesis, deriving semantic representations from word co-occurrence statistics. However, current deep learning methods entail fundamentally new models of lexical and compositional meaning that are ripe for theoretical analysis. Whereas traditional distributional semantics models take a bottom-up approach in which sentence meaning is characterized by explicit composition functions applied to word meanings, new approaches take a top-down approach in which sentence representations are treated as primary and representations of words and syntax are viewed as emergent. This article summarizes our current understanding of how well such representations capture lexical semantics, world knowledge, and composition. The goal is to foster increased collaboration on testing the implications of such representations as general-purpose models of semantics. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 8 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

«One, Two - Trees...»: Counting-out Rhymes in the Teaching of Ukrainian Language to Foreign Students

The article is devoted to the research of linguodidactic potential of counting-out rhymes in classes of Ukrainian as a foreign language. Now there are many works in Ukrainian methodology of teaching language to foreign students concerning the formation of a set of texts for studying purposes. The authors of selected scientific articles suggest including folklore texts (fairy tales, songs, legends, proverbs and sayings, tongue twisters) in the teaching of the Ukrainian language. The aim of our article is to explore the place and role of the counting-out rhyme as a supplementary text for foreign students of beginner level. For this purpose, we describe the definition of the term «counting-out rhyme», define the linguistic and methodological criteria for selecting texts and how they should be presented to foreign audiences. Results of the research. The counting-out rhyme is a genre of children's playful folklore, a small-form poetic text with a clear rhyme-rhythmic structure. For to study Ukrainian as a foreign language at the beginning stage not all the texts of counting-out rhymes are suitable, but only those that folklorist G. Vinogradov called «chislovka» or «proper chislovka". This type of counting-out rhymes have cardinal numbers and ordinal numbers as a part of their structure. We consider that the main criteria for selecting and presenting texts of this genre as educational units should be: 1) a simple structure, clear and understandable content of the text; 2) the common vocabulary of counting-out rhymes, which corresponds as much as possible to communicative topics and grammatical material of the beginner level of Ukrainian language learning; 3) the texts of the counting rhymes should be chosen with the aim of practising certain speech skills and abilities; 4) limited amount of the material. In classes with foreign students, we primarily use counting-out rhymes to introduce the category of numerals and to teach counting. Children's folklore play texts act as very important supplementary linguistic material. Rational, accurate counting (mostly from one to ten) and the rhythm and rhythmics of the short poetic text help a foreign student to learn to count in Ukrainian quickly and easily. In addition, the expressive reading of counting-out rhymes helps to improve the phonetic aspect of foreign language speech - clear pronunciation of separate sounds, intonation, accents, training of rhythm, speed of speech. Working with the texts of counting-out rhymes in UFL classes also actualises word meanings within the boundaries of communicative topics of the first year of language learning, enriches vocabulary, and optimises the rapid memorisation of typical lexical-grammatical constructions with their subsequent inclusion in the active vocabulary. Moreover, tasks with counting-out rhymes engage an element of a game in the learning process, making the lesson more exciting and interesting. Conclusions. The results of the analysis show that the counting-out rhymes have linguodidactic potential and can be used as supplementary teaching material in UFL classes (beginner level).

Note-taking in consecutive interpreting. On the reconstruction of an individualised language

To facilitate the process of consecutive interpreting, professional interpreters typically use a special system of note-taking. In the approaches developed on the basis of practical interpreting experience, these notations are commonly regarded as a note-taking technique, and in relevant specialist literature they are often conceived as a language-independent instrument. Against the background of a cognitive approach, however, it can be shown that the so¬called note-taking TECHNIQUE can adequately be described by means of the theoretical constructs LANGUAGE and DISCOURSE. The language dimension is explored with regard to word meanings, word formation and inflection, semantic relations at sentence and text level as well as pragmatic functions. The discourse dimension is mainly discussed from the perspective of rele¬vance theory with a particular emphasis on the balance between the explicit and the implicit.

‘Balish’: Bahasa Inggris Dialek Pekerja Pariwisata di Kawasan Wisata Kuta Bali

English plays an important role for workers in the tourism sector of all classes, including wholesalers, massage therapists, parking attendants, and shop assistants. Preliminary observations show that they, in general, use Balinese dialect of English or Balish. This article describes the Balish used in tourism area of Kuta, Bali, by tourism workers who have naturalized the English language by adopting several language features, especially Balinese and Indonesian, such as sentence structures, words, and expressions. The data were analyzed using The New Englishes theory and the results showed that the use of Balinese and Indonesian words in English resulted in the creation of new words, grammatical shifts, changes in word meanings, use of idioms, use of groups of verbs, and repetition of forms. Balish has adopted several grammatical features, both from Balinese and Indonesian, and it is hoped that one day it will have regular speakers so that it becomes a pidgin.

Recollecting What We Once Knew: My Life in Psycholinguistics

The mid-twentieth century brought a radical change in how the linguistics community formulated its major goal, moving from a largely taxonomic science to Chomsky's revolution, which conceptualized language as a higher-order cognitive function. This article reviews the paths (not always direct) that brought Lila Gleitman into contact with that revolution, her contributions to it, and the evolution in her thinking about how language is learned by every child, regardless of extreme variation in the input received. To understand how that occurs, we need to discover what must be learned by the child and what is already there to guide that learning—what must be, in Plato's terms, “recollected.” The growing picture shows a learner equipped with information-processing mechanisms that extract evidence about word meanings using various evidential sources. Chief among these are the observational and linguistic-syntactic contexts in which words occur. The former is supported by a mechanism Gleitman and her collaborators call “propose but verify,” and the latter by a mechanism known as “syntactic boot-strapping.” Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 73 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.