Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This article shows that a substantial portion of the empirical evidence regarding the representation of word meaning can be explained by the definitional semantic theory of Jerrold J. Katz (henceforth ST) . First, we look at the relative complexities of four types of negatives which, according to Fodor, Fodor, and Garrett (1975; henceforth FFG) , show that definitions are not psychologically real. The ST definitional structures explain the FFG results in terms of the number of disjuncts generated by the negative elements in their ST representations. Next we look at the arguments of Centner for componential structure from evidence from a recall experiment that considers connectedness relationships between the noun phrases of sentences with three types of verbs. Centner's results can be explained in terms of the number of argument places in the ST representations, and the same explanation can be used with respect to evidence from studies by