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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (144 results)

  • Book
Dissertations, Department of Linguistics (2001)
    Cover page: Of Sound, Mind, and Body: Neural Explanations for Non-categorical Phonology
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 27 (2005)
      Cover page: Mental Simulation in Spatial Language Processing
      • Article
      • Peer Reviewed
      Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 35 (2013)
        Cover page: When Tuesday comes before Threesday: Cross-linguistic differences in numerical transparency of time words predicts temporal reasoning strategy and performance
        • Article
        • Peer Reviewed
        Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 44 (2022)
        Previous work has found competing evidence for how contextual diversity influences early word learning. In support of contextual diversity facilitating learning, the corpus-derived diversity metric from Hills, Maouene, Riordan, and Smith (2010) was found to correlate with earlier ages of acquisition in children. We extend this work to five languages, accounting for a nonlinear relationship between the raw contextual diversity metric and word log-frequencies, and we account for additional covariates such as word length, concreteness, and lexical class. In contrast with the original result, we find that contextually diverse words are acquired later by children across languages. Our findings support the hypothesis that contextual diversity introduces an excess of possible meanings for contextually diverse words, adding noise to the word learning process. This hindering effect overshadows any benefits of syntactic or semantic bootstrapping during early word learning, when children are still in the early stages of vocabulary and conceptual development.
          Cover page: Does Contextual Diversity Hinder Early Word Acquisition?Creative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
          • Thesis
          • Peer Reviewed
          UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2022)

          Words contain multitudes. This multiplicity of meanings raises two key questions, both of which this thesis attempts to address. First, are word meanings categorical or continuous? The results of Chapters 2-4 support a hybrid model, in which word meanings occupy a continuous state-space (Elman, 2009), which is further discretized along the boundaries of distinct senses. And second, does the amount and distribution of homophony in real lexica reflect a pressure to concentrate meanings in the most efficient, optimal wordforms? The results in Chapters 5-7 suggest that homophony can emerge without a direct pressure for efficiency––and further, that real lexica might select against homophones, particularly among the most frequent wordforms of a lexicon. This pressure could even explain other properties of human lexica, such as their large phonological neighborhoods.

            Cover page: Ambiguity in the Mind and the Lexicon
            • Article
            • Peer Reviewed
            Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 36 (2014)
              Cover page: The strategic use of noise in pragmatic reasoning
              • Article
              • Peer Reviewed
              Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 44 (2022)
              Words in human languages cluster together in phonological neighborhoods more closely than would be expected by chance. But why? One explanation is that large neighborhoods are directly selected for, possibly because they scaffold word learning and production. But it's also possible that they emerge as a byproduct of other constraints or selection pressures operating over real lexica. We advance one such selection pressure as a candidate explanation. A pressure to avoid overloading unique wordforms with homophones may lead to clusters of words that are not identical but similar. Using simulated baselines, we test the viability of this alternative account. We find that a pressure against loading too many meanings on unique wordforms––paired with the phonotactics of a target language––produces lexica with neighborhoods that are at least as large on average as those in real lexica. This does not rule out the possibility of a pro-neighborhood pressure, but it does demonstrate the viability of a parsimonious alternative account based on a pressure against homonymy for which there is independent evidence.
                Cover page: Can a pressure against homophones explain phonological neighborhoods?Creative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
                • Article
                • Peer Reviewed
                Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 27 (2005)
                  Cover page: Writing Direction Influences Spatial Cognition
                  • Thesis
                  • Peer Reviewed
                  UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2016)

                  This dissertation presents the results of three projects at the intersection of computational semantics and cognitive semantics. The theme underlying all three projects is that closer coordination between cognitive semantics and computational semantics can lead to more accurate computational semantic tools, and can also provide tools that can help address questions in cognitive semantics.

                    Cover page: Computational and Cognitive Semantics: Three Investigations into the Statistics and Structure of Meaning in Language
                    • Article
                    • Peer Reviewed
                    Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 43 (2021)
                    When do people use knowledge about the world in order to comprehend language? We asked whether pronoun resolution decisions are influenced by knowledge about physical plausibility. Results showed that referents which are more physically plausible in described events were more likely to be selected as antecedents of ambiguous pronouns, implying that resolution decisions were driven by physical inference. An alternative explanation is that these decisions were driven instead by distributional word knowledge. We tested this by including predictions of a statistical language model (BERT) and found that physical plausibility explained variance on top of the statistical language model predictions. This indicates that at least part of people's pronoun resolution judgments comes from knowledge about the world and not the word. This result constrains psycholinguistic models of comprehension—world knowledge must influence propositional interpretation—and raises the broader question of how non-linguistic physical inference processes are incorporated during comprehension.
                      Cover page: The Role of Physical Inference in Pronoun ResolutionCreative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
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