The lexicon

1. Langston Psycholinguistics Lecture 6 The lexicon

2. http://xkcd.com/1012/

3. What is a Word? • A word is… (write your definition). • From Pinker: Two approaches…

4. What is a Word? • A syntactic atom: A unit that can't be divided further by syntactic rules. A word may be a product of rules, but it is an atom from the perspective of syntax. • Electric (root) • Shoes (shoe + plural) • Crunchable (capable of crunching) • Toothbrush (compund) • Yugoslavia report

5. What is a Word? • A rote-memorized chunk of “linguistic stuff” paired with an arbitrary meaning. The elements are listemes (entries in your mental dictionary; any element whose meaning and form have to be associated).

6. How Many Words? • High school graduate: 45,000. • Pinker: We're not playing Scrabble. Counting proper names, foreign words, etc. 60,000. • How do you learn all of that? That is 10 words a day, every day, from your first birthday. It's a lot for a totally arbitrary pairing. • How do you store and access all of that information?

7. Word Formation • Make words out of smaller elements the way sentences are made out of words. • The wug test: “This is a wug. Now there are two of them, now there are two _____.”

8. Word Formation • The wug test:

9. Word Formation • The wug test: • If kids can answer this question, it must be a rule (add -s).

10. Word Grammar • Elements + rules? • N -> Nstem + Ninflection (a noun is a noun stem plus a noun inflection). • Dogs -> Dog + -s • Nstem -> Nstem + Nstem • Toothbrush-holder fastener box

11. Word Grammar • Elements + rules? • Nstem -> Nroot + Nrootaffix (some morphemes go with roots, some with stems). • Darwinian, Darwinianism, Darwinianisms. • Darwinism, Darwinismian.

12. Word Grammar • Inflectional morphology: Inflect the meanings of words. Change the meaning. • Two noun forms: duck, ducks. • Four verb forms: quack, quacks, quacked, quacking. • English not rich in this.

13. Word Grammar • Derivational morphology: The meaning can be derived from the bits. • English offers a lot more to choose from here.

14. Word Grammar

15. Word Grammar • What is the longest word? Pinker (2000) says that this is a meaningless question. • Floccinaucinihilipilification • Floccinaucinihilipilificational • Floccinaucinihilipilificationalize • Floccinaucinihilipilificationalization

16. Meaning • Once we know what a word is we still have a big problem: What does a word mean? There is an arbitrary association between form and meaning, so how do you make those connections?

17. Meaning • We discussed Aslin, Saffran, & Newport (1998) as an example of how word boundaries can be detected in speech. • Now, the gavagai problem. A rabbit runs by and someone says “gavagai.” Do they mean rabbit, furry, tail, running?

18. Meaning • Pinker (2000) suggests two “legs up” that help with this problem: • A predisposition to chop the world into individuals, classes, and actions. • Categorization: • Superordinate. • Basic. • Subordinate.

19. Meaning • Categorization: You can tell basic level because they have the most feature overlap. • What features (unique to furniture) do all members of the category furniture have in common? • What features do all chairs have in common? • What features do all desk chairs have in common? • The longest list should be at the basic level.

20. Meaning • Pinker (2000) claims that adults and children both operate at the basic level. • Rabbit runs by, adult more likely to say “rabbit” than “animal” or “Beveren.” • Kids also seem to expect this. • Dax task. • Show tongs, call them dax, ask for more dax, they pick a different set of tongs (assume the word is the basic level category). • Show cup, call it dax (they know the word cup), they assume dax refers to what the cup is made of.

21. Meaning • http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/491/whats-the-origin-of-kangaroo-court (3/30/11) • I never imagined that the day would come when I would spot an error in your witty and admirably researched column, but your recent discussion of the etymology of kangaroo, alas, shows you aren't up to date on the research in this area. In the GuuguYimidhirr language, spoken by the aboriginals of the area where Captain Cook's party recorded the term kangooroo (the original spelling), this word (more accurately pronounced something like kang-ooroo) refers to a particular species of kangaroo, namely the large black kangaroo. The only error Cook's party can be accused of is mistaking the name of one variety of kangaroo for the generic term. I hope you will be able to bring your readers up to date on this question and disillusion them regarding the widespread mythology surrounding it.

22. Meaning • Four levels of meaning: • Referential: What the word refers to (the actual thing). If I say “the book is too long” the referential meaning is the particular book we are discussing. • Denotative: The generic concept that underlies the word. There is a lot of stuff you know about book besides some particular book.

23. Meaning • Four levels of meaning: • Denotative: How organized? Features…

24. Meaning • Four levels of meaning: • Denotative: How organized? Features… • One problem is that you need a lot of features. (Fewer than the number of things classified, hopefully.) • Also, some features seem like they need features themselves (e.g., mammal). • Getting the right set that classifies everything with the fewest possible is tough and somewhat arbitrary (calling them transducible helps a little).

25. Meaning • Four levels of meaning: • Denotative: Add boy…

26. Meaning • Four levels of meaning: • Denotative: Add boy… • We'd prefer not to add a feature for every new concept. • How would you add computer to that table? It seems like features vary in “importance” to a particular concept, how is that captured? • There are other ways of organizing denotative information that get around some of these issues.

27. Meaning • Four levels of meaning: • Associative: What you think of when you hear the word (other words associated with it). • Origins: • Common expressions (“coffee, tea, or milk”). • Experience (we usually see tables and chairs together). • Antonyms (good-bad). • Units (ding-dong).

28. Meaning • Four levels of meaning: • Associative: • Assessing: Count concepts in common, the more things they share the higher the associative similarity. • Producing associations: • Network models: Assume distance in semantic space is meaningful. Two things that are associatively related are closer in semantic space. • Feature flipping: Find associates by flipping features.

29. Meaning • Four levels of meaning: • Affective: How a word makes you feel. We will come to this a bit later… • A fifth level: What to do with embodiment? If understanding a word or sentence involves a motor component, is that meaning? What about images, metaphors, and spatial relationships (iconicity)?

30. Meaning • How do you access meaning? The lexicon must be organized in such a way as to have direct access. • Tip of the tongue state (TOT; Frick-Horbury & Guttentag, 1998): • An arch or hoop in croquet that the balls have to be hit through. • A frame or latticework for climbing plants. • A black cutout of paper to represent the outline of a person's head.

31. Meaning • The lexicon needs at least this information: • Vision: Appearance of word. • Words. • Partial words (a _ _ a _ _ in). • Vision: Access meaning from appearance of object. • Audition: • Words. • Partial words (phonemic restoration). • Audition: The sounds things make.

32. Meaning • The lexicon needs at least this information: • Touch. • Smell. • Taste. • Things that affect access: • Frequency. • Morphology. • Syntactic category. • Priming. • Ambiguity. • Whatever model we come up with needs to know this.

33. Lexical Organization • Network models (e.g., Collins & Loftus, 1975): Arrange information into a network.

35. Lexical Organization • Collins and Loftus (1975): • Spreading activation; decreasing gradient. • The longer you process a concept the longer it sends activation. • Activation decreases over time. • “Intersection” has a threshold for firing. • Organize network around semantic similarity. • Link network to lexicon with phonemic and orthographic information in it.

36. Lexical Organization • Collins and Loftus (1975): • These kinds of models can account for categorization phenomena and a lot of other data. • Plausible?

37. Lexical Organization • Landauer and Dumais (1997): Latent semantic analysis. • “A typical American seventh grader knows the meaning of 10-15 words today that she did not know yesterday. She must have acquired them as a result of reading because (a) the majority of English words are used only in print, (b) she already knew well almost all the words she would have encountered in speech, and (c) she learned less than one word by direct instruction” (p. 211).

38. Lexical Organization • Landauer and Dumais (1997): • That's the problem. But, it gets harder: • “Studies of children reading grade-school text find that about one word in every 20 paragraphs goes from wrong to right on a vocabulary test. The typical seventh grader would have read less than 50 paragraphs since yesterday, from which she should have learned less than three new words. Apparently, she mastered the meanings of many words that she did not encounter” (p. 211).

39. Lexical Organization • Landauer and Dumais (1997): • Problem: “how people acquire as much knowledge as they do on the basis of as little information as they get” (p. 212). • Solve this problem with “a high-dimensional linear associative model that embodies no human knowledge beyond its general learning mechanism” (p. 211).

40. Lexical Organization • Landauer and Dumais (1997): • Anti-instinctivist in the sense that they don't think Pinker's approach actually explains how it gets done (“it's biology” is not an answer). • Instead, it's a constraint satisfaction problem. Evaluate their hypothesis with a model and compare it to people.

41. Lexical Organization • Landauer and Dumais (1997): • Create a matrix with rows representing event types (e.g., words) and columns representing contexts (e.g., paragraphs). • The numbers in the cells are the numbers of times a word appears in a particular context.

42. Lexical Organization • Landauer and Dumais (1997): • Compress this matrix to an optimal dimensionality. • This allows latent knowledge to emerge.

43. Lexical Organization • Landauer and Dumais (1997): • Evaluation: • Learn language from encyclopedia entries. Answer Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) items. Model 64.4% correct, applicants 64.5%. “Closely mimicked the behavior of a group of moderately proficient English readers” (p. 220). • Etc.

44. Lexical Organization • Landauer and Dumais (1997): • Conclusions (from vocabulary simulations): • “LSA learns a great deal about word meaning similarities from text” (p. 226). • “About three quarters of LSA's word knowledge is the result of indirect induction, the effect of exposure to text not containing words used in the tests” (p. 226). • “There is enough information present in the language to which human learners are exposed to allow them to acquire the knowledge they exhibit on multiple-choice vocabulary tests” (p. 226).

45. Lexical Organization • Landauer and Dumais (1997): • Note: Did not use spoken language, morphology, syntax, logic, or perceptual world knowledge. • Not claiming this is what people do, but it does show how much information is there. • I guess our question could be: Is there a need for more than this, or is the information all there? • Symbol grounding problem (contrast to embodiment; Glenberg & Gallese, in press).

46. Taboo FCUK

47. Taboo • Jay (2009; doi:10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01115.x): • “What are taboo words and why do they exist? • What motivates people to use taboo words? • How often do people say taboo words, and who says them? • What are the most frequently used taboo words?” (p. 153)

48. Taboo • Jay (2009): • What are taboo words and why do they exist? • “sanctioned or restricted on both institutional and individual levels under the assumption that some harm will occur if a taboo word is spoken” (p. 153).

49. Taboo • Jay (2009): • What are taboo words and why do they exist? • Proposes that aversive classical conditioning gives taboo words their taboo. • Taboo boundaries are fuzzy, even when legally defined.

50. Taboo • Jay (2009): • What are taboo words and why do they exist? • Taboo semantic range limited in English (sexual, profane or blasphemous, scatalogical, some animal names, ethnic-racial-gender slurs, perceived psychological, physical, or social deviations, ancestral allusions, slang). • Offensiveness determined by context.