Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Developing accurate models of word meaning requires good empirical evidence about what words mean. I investigate how English verbs encode relationships between event participants, focusing on how verbs encode instruments (e.g., does slice specify that a tool must be used for slicing?). I compared two commonly used indices of verb meaning: linguistic judgments and sentence completions. Although these two indices were moderately correlated for a small sample of verbs, they were only weakly correlated when a larger sample of verbs was tested. These results indicate that the particular context of a task can strongly influence how meaning affects behavior. Dominant models of verb meaning fail to fully account for the results (either a logical entailment model or a cue-based model).