A fundamental aspect of human cognition is the ability to parse our constantly unfolding experience into meaningful representations of dynamic events and to communicate about these events with others. How do we communicate about events we have experienced? Influential theories of language production assume that the formulation and articulation of a linguistic message is preceded by preverbal apprehension that captures core aspects of the event. Yet the nature of these preverbal event representations and the way they are mapped onto language (...) are currently not well understood. Here, we review recent evidence on the link between event conceptualization and language, focusing on two core aspects of event representation: event roles and event boundaries. Empirical evidence in both domains shows that the cognitive representation of events aligns with the way these aspects of events are encoded in language, providing support for the presence of deep homologies between linguistic and cognitive event structure. (shrink)

The underlying structures that are common to the world's languages bear an intriguing connection with early emerging forms of “core knowledge” (Spelke & Kinzler, 2007), which are frequently studied by infant researchers. In particular, grammatical systems often incorporate distinctions (e.g., the mass/count distinction) that reflect those made in core knowledge (e.g., the non-verbal distinction between an object and a substance). Here, I argue that this connection occurs because non-verbal core knowledge systematically biases processes of language evolution. This account potentially explains (...) a wide range of cross-linguistic grammatical phenomena that currently lack an adequate explanation. Second, I suggest that developmental researchers and cognitive scientists interested in (non-verbal) knowledge representation can exploit this connection to language by using observations about cross-linguistic grammatical tendencies to inspire hypotheses about core knowledge. (shrink)

Conceptual atomists argue that most of our concepts are primitive. I take up three arguments that have been thought to support atomism and show that they are inconclusive. The evidence that allegedly backs atomism is equally compatible with a localist position on which concepts are structured representations with complex semantic content. I lay out such a localist position and argue that the appropriate position for a non-atomist to adopt is a pluralist view of conceptual structure. I show several ways in (...) which conceptual pluralism provides an advantage in satisfying the empirical and philosophical demands on a theory of conceptual structure and content. (shrink)

What are the semantic representations that underlie language production? We use structural priming to distinguish between two competing theories. Thematic roles define semantic structure in terms of atomic units that specify event participants and are ordered with respect to each other through a hierarchy of roles. Event structures instead instantiate semantic structure as embedded sub‐predicates that impose an order on verbal arguments based on their relative positioning in these embeddings. Across two experiments, we found that priming for datives depended on (...) the degree of overlap in event structures. Specifically, while all dative structures showed priming, due to common syntax, there was a boost for compositional datives priming other compositional datives. Here, the two syntactic forms have distinct event structures. In contrast, there was no boost in priming for dative light verbs, where the two forms map onto a single event representation. On the thematic roles hypothesis, we would have expected a similar degree of priming for the two cases. Thus, our results support event structural approaches to semantic representation and not thematic roles. (shrink)

The arguments of Fodor, Garret, Walker and Parkes [(1980) Against definitions, Cognition, 8, 263-367] are the source of widespread skepticism in cognitive science about lexical semantic structure. Whereas the thesis that lexical items, and the concepts they express, have decompositional structure (i.e. have significant constituents) was at one time "one of those ideas that hardly anybody [in the cognitive sciences] ever considers giving up" (p. 264), most researchers now believe that "[a]ll the evidence suggests that the classical [(decompositional)] view is (...) wrong as a general theory of concepts" [Smith, Medin & Rips (1984) A psychological approach to concepts: comments on Rey, Cognition, 17, 272], and cite Fodor et al. (1980) as "sounding the death knell for decompositional theories" [MacNamara & Miller (1989) Attributes of theories of meaning, Psychological Bulletin, 106, 360]. I argue that the prevailing skepticism is unmotivated by the arguments in Fodor et al. Fodor et al. misrepresent the form, function and scope of the decompositional hypothesis, and the procedures they employ to test for the psychological reality of definitions are flawed. I argue, further, that decompositional explanations of the phenomena they consider are preferable to their primitivist alternatives, and, hence, that there is prima facie reason to accept them as evidence for the existence of decompositional structure. Cognitive scientists would, therefore, do well to revert to their former commitment to the decompositional hypothesis. (shrink)

Relational, operator, and predicate systems are distinguished on the basis that they correspond to the three possible pair-wise bracketings into two constituents of the three parts of a proposition: relation, subject, and object. It is asserted that the verbal propositional modality (left hemisphere) uses a predicate grammar, while the spatial-image operational modality (right hemisphere) uses an operator grammar. Verbal propositional memory has the capacity for extensive propositional embedding while spatial operational memory does not.

This article addresses the ability of Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) networks to generate stagewise cognitive development in accordance with Piaget's theory of cognitive epigenesis. We carried out a replication study of the simulation experiments by McClelland (1989) and McClelland and Jenkins (1991) in which a PDP network learns to solve balance scale problems. In objective tests motivated from catastrophe theory, a mathematical theory of transitions in epigenetical systems, no evidence for stage transitions in network performance was found. It is concluded (...) that PDP networks lack the ability to recover the positive outcomes of analogous catastrophe analyses of real cognitive developmental data. In an attempt to further characterize the learning behaviour of PDP networks, we carried out a second simulation study using the discrimination‐shift paradigm. The results thus obtained indicate that PDP learning is compatible with the learning of stimulus‐response relationships, not with the acquisition of mediating rules such as conceived in (neo‐)Piagetian theory. In closing, we speculate about the feasibility of simulating stagewise development with alternative network architectures. (shrink)

This paper describes the SNePS knowledge-representation and reasoning system. SNePS is an intensional, propositional, semantic-network processing system used for research in AI. We look at how predication is represented in such a system when it is used for cognitive modeling and natural-language understanding and generation. In particular, we discuss issues in the representation of fictional entities and the representation of propositions from fiction, using SNePS. We briefly survey four philosophical ontological theories of fiction and sketch an epistemological theory of fiction (...) using a story operator and rules for allowing propositions to migrate into and out of story spaces. (shrink)

It is often argued that human emotions, and the cognitions that accompany them, involve refinements of, and extensions to, more basic functionality shared with other species. Such refinements may rely on common or on distinct processes and representations. Multi-level theories of cognition and affect make distinctions between qualitatively different types of representations often dealing with bodily, affective and cognitive attributes of self-related meanings. This paper will adopt a particular multi-level perspective on mental architecture and show how a mechanism of subsystem (...) differentiation could have allowed an evolutionarily “old” role for emotion in the control of action to have altered into one more closely coupled to meaning systems. We conclude by outlining some illustrative consequences of our analysis that might usefully be addressed in research in comparative psychology, cognitive archaeology, and in laboratory research on memory for emotional material. (shrink)

A distributed neural network model called SPEC for processing sentences with recursive relative clauses is described. The model is based on separating the tasks of segmenting the input word sequence into clauses, forming the case‐role representations, and keeping track of the recursive embeddings into different modules. The system needs to be trained only with the basic sentence constructs, and it generalizes not only to new instances of familiar relative clause structures but to novel structures as well. SPEC exhibits plausible memory (...) degradation as the depth of the center embeddings increases, its memory is primed by earlier constituents, and its performance is aided by semantic constraints between the constituents. The ability to process structure is largely due to a central executive network that monitors and controls the execution of the entire system. This way, in contrast to earlier subsymbolic systems, parsing is modeled as a controlled high‐level process rather than one based on automatic reflex responses. (shrink)

This paper describes a computer simulation of reading that is strongly driven by eye fixation data from human readers. The simulation, READER, is a natural language understanding system that reads a text word by word and whose processing cycles on each word have some correspondence with the human gaze duration on that word. READER operates within a newly developed information processing architecture, a Collaborative, Activation‐based, Production System (CAPS) that permits the modeling of the temporal properties of human comprehension. CAPS allows (...) for concurrent, collaborative execution of processes operating at different levels of analysis. As READER encounters each successive word, the word is operated on by processes at the levels of word encoding, lexical access, syntactic and semantic analysis, and referential and schema‐level processes. Like human readers, READER uses a strategy of immediacy of comprehension, attempting to interpret each word as soon as it is encountered, rather than unnecessarily buffering information. A major contribution of this simulation is its use of human performance characteristics in constraining and determining the model's mechanisms. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 5, May 2022.

At conceptual and linguistic levels of cognition, events are said to be represented in terms of abstract categories, for example, the sentence Jackie cut the bagel with a knife encodes the categories Agent (i.e., Jackie) and Patient (i.e., the bagel). In this paper, we ask whether entities such as the knife are also represented in terms of such a category (often labeled “Instrument”) and, if so, whether this category has a prototype structure. We hypothesized the Proto-instrument is a tool: a (...) physical object manipulated by an intentional agent to affect a change in another individual or object. To test this, we asked speakers of English, Dutch, and German to complete an event description task and a sentence acceptability judgment task in which events were viewed with more or less prototypical instruments. We found broad similarities in how English, Dutch, and German partition the semantic space of instrumental events, suggesting there is a shared concept of the Instrument category. However, there was no evidence to support the specific hypothesis that tools are the core of the Instrument category—instead, our results suggest the most prototypical Instrument is the direct extension of an intentional agent. This paper supports theoretical frameworks where thematic roles are analyzed in terms of prototypes and suggests new avenues of research on how instrumental category structure differs across linguistic and conceptual domains. (shrink)

This paper studies the relationship of Artificial Intelligence to the study of language and the representation of the underlying knowledge which supports the comprehension process. It develops the view that intelligence is based on the ability to use large amounts of diverse kinds of knowledge in procedural ways, rather than on the possession of a few general and uniform principles. The paper also provides a unifying thread to a variety of recent approaches to natural language comprehension. We conclude with a (...) brief discussion of how Artificial Intelligence may have a radical impact on education if the principles which it utilizes to explore the representation and use of knowledge are made available to the student to use in his own learning experiences. (shrink)

The paper argues for a decompositionalist account of lexical concepts. In particular, it presents and argues for a cluster decompositionalism, a view that claims that the complexes a token of a word corresponds to on a given occasion are typically built out of a determinate set of basic concepts, most of which are present on most other occasions of use of the word. The first part of the paper discusses some explanatory virtues of decompositionalism in general. The second singles out (...) cluster decompositionalism as the best explanation of the variability of meaning. The third part is devoted to responding to some problems. (shrink)

We present a processing model that integrates same important psychological claims about the human sentence‐parsing mechanism: namely, that processing is influenced by limitations an working memory and by various syntactic preferences. The model uses time‐constraint information to resolve conflicting preferences in a psychologically plausible way. The starting paint far this proposal is the Sausage Machine model (Fodor & Frazier, 1980: Frazier & Fodor, 1978). From there, we attempt to overcome the original model's dependence an ad hoc aspects of its grammar, (...) and its omission of verb‐frame preferences. We also add mechanisms far lexical disambiguation and semantic processing in parallel with syntactic processing. (shrink)

The paper addresses the main questions to be dealt with by any semantic theory which is committed to provide an explanation of how meaning is possible. On one side the paper argues that the resources provided by the development of mathematical logic, theoretical computer science, cognitive psychology, and general linguistics in the 20th Century, however indispensable to investigate the structure of language, rely on the existence of end products in the morphogenesis of meaning. On the other, the paper argues that (...) philosophy of language, which, either in the analytic or the structuralist or the hermeneutical tradition, made little use of such resources (when they are not simply rejected). Left the main question unanswered. Though phenomenology intended to focus on the constitutive process, it ended up mostly with philology. Cognitive semantics paved the way to focus on patterns of bodily interaction within the natural environment out of which basic schemes emerge and are metaphorically “lifted” to any universe of discourse. The explanatory commitment is thus endorsed through two hypotheses: (1) these schemes, of topological and kinaesthetic structure, determine the range of forms of atomic sentences of any natural language, and (2) the category-theoretic notion of universality allows for a proper analysis of how such schemes are “lifted”. (shrink)

Many people have noted the similarities between case theories in linguistics and frame representations in artificial intelligence. In particular, the cases of a verb seem to correspond to the slots of a frame. This has led many people, including Fillmore [1977] and Winston [1977] to assert that cases and slots are one and the same. This hypothesis has not attracted much attention, probably because the notion of “slot” in frame representations is so underconstrained that the theory would seem to be (...) content free. In this note, we wish to show that this is not true. For one thing, the case‐slot identity theory can explain the difficulty linguists have had in deciding how many cases there are. Furthermore, its adoption will place certain interesting, and plausible constraints on the frame and case theories compatible with it. (shrink)

Four philosophical problems--predication, speech acts, rules, and innate ideas--are discussed in the light of their implications for psychological and linguistic research. The discussion of predication concerns both form and use. With respect to form, it is argued that our lexical memory is organized according to a predicate-argument formula that underlies the subject-predicate form of our sentences. With respect to use, it is argued that the illocutionary force of the sentence as a speech act must be taken into account. Both the (...) formation and the use of such verbal constructions are normally characterized by systems of rules, but there is no clear account of what a rule is or how it might operate to control behavior, and this problem is especially difficult when, as in language, the person's knowledge of the rules is implicit. The innate basis for our human ability to acquire linguistic rules is considered and the problem of innateness is redefined around the conjecture that there are innate, language-specific mechanisms unique to human beings. The problem of investigating such language-specific mechanisms psychologically, however, is quite difficult at the present time. (shrink)

Interactive media need their own idioms that exploit the characteristics of the computer based sign. The fact that the reader can physically influence the course of events in the system changes the author's role, since he no longer creates a linear text but anarrative space that the reader can use to generate stories. Although stories are not simulations of the real world, they must still contain recognizable parts where everyday constraints of time and space hold. AI-techniques can be used to (...) implement these constraints. In fact, we suggest that AI is probably best seen as an aesthetic phenomenon. (shrink)