Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Levin (1993) has proposed a semantic distinction between two types of motion verbs: manner of motion verbs and inherently directed motion verbs. In contrast, Jones (1995) has argued that this distinction is better accounted for by syntactic principles. Two simulations are presented that demonstrate that verb representations from the Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL) model of memory (Burgess & Lund, 1997a; Lund & Burgess, 1996) are sensitive to the distinction between these two verb classes. The second simulation shows that this effect is not due to word frequency differences. The final experiment uses human judgments of concreteness, imageability, and familiarity on these verbs to provide further data on the particular semantic characteristics that may be salient to the language user. We argue that these results provide empirical support for Levin's semantic distinctions.