This volume contains perspectives from a collection of cognitive scientists on the psychological, philosophical, and educational issues surrounding the meanings of words and how these meanings are learned and accessed. It features chapters covering the nature and structure of word meaning, how new word meanings are acquired in childhood and later on in life, and how research in word processing may tell us something about the way in which word meanings are represented and how they relate to the language processor.
How do children learn that the word "dog" refers not to all four-legged animals, and not just to Ralph, but to all members of a particular species? How do they learn the meanings of verbs like "think," adjectives like "good," and words for abstract entities such as "mortgage" and "story"? The acquisition of word meaning is one of the fundamental issues in the study of mind. According to Paul Bloom, children learn words through sophisticated cognitive abilities that exist for other purposes. These include the ability to infer others' intentions, the ability to acquire concepts, an appreciation of syntactic structure, and certain general learning and memory abilities. Although other researchers have associated word learning with some of these capacities, Bloom is the first to show how a complete explanation requires all of them. The acquisition of even simple nouns requires rich conceptual, social, and linguistic capacities interacting in complex ways. This book requires no background in psychology or linguistics and is written in a clear, engaging style. Topics include the effects of language on spatial reasoning, the origin of essentialist beliefs, and the young child's understanding of representational art. The book should appeal to general readers interested in language and cognition as well as to researchers in the field.
Including more than 11,000 definitions, this authoritative and up-to-date dictionary covers all branches of psychology. Clear, concise descriptions for each entry offer extensive coverage of key areas including cognition, sensation and perception, emotion and motivation, learning and skills, language, mental disorder, and research methods. The range of entries extends to related disciplines including psychoanalysis, psychiatry, the neurosciences, and statistics. Entries are extensively cross-referenced for ease of use, and cover word origins and derivations as well as definitions. More than 100 illustrations complement the text
Research concerning structure and processing in the mental lexicon has achieved central prominence within cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. Historically, however, much of the research on the lexicon focussed not on its role in language comprehension, but as a medium for studying semantic memory. This picture has changed in recent years, with much more research examining the role of lexical processes and output in language comprehension.Gathered together in this volume is the work of some of those researchers who are responsible for this shift of emphasis. Chapters deal with the role of sentence contexts in word recognition, processes involved in the activation and enhancement of lexical information, and the interaction of lexical and syntactic information in sentence processing. A wide range of theoretical and empirical issues relating to language understanding are discussed.
This volume contains perspectives from a collection of cognitive scientists on the psychological, philosophical, and educational issues surrounding the meanings of words and how these meanings are learned and accessed. It features chapters covering the nature and structure of word meaning, how new word meanings are acquired in childhood and later on in life, and how research in word processing may tell us something about the way in which word meanings are represented and how they relate to the language processor.
This comprehensive study of the psychology of language explores how we speak, read, remember, learn and understand language. The author examines each of these aspects in detail.
This volume contains perspectives from a collection of cognitive scientists on the psychological, philosophical, and educational issues surrounding the meanings of words and how these meanings are learned and accessed. It features chapters covering the nature and structure of word meaning, how new word meanings are acquired in childhood and later on in life, and how research in word processing may tell us something about the way in which word meanings are represented and how they relate to the language processor.
Language, whether spoken or written, is an important window into people's emotional and cognitive worlds. Text analysis of these narratives, focusing on specific words or classes of words, has been used in numerous research studies including studies of emotional, cognitive, structural, and process components of individuals' verbal and written language. It was in this research context that the LIWC program was developed. The program analyzes text files on a word-by-word basis, calculating percentage words that match each of several language dimensions. Its output is a text file that can be opened in any of a variety of applications, including word processors and spreadsheet programs. The program has 68 pre-set dimensions (output variables) including linguistic dimensions, word categories tapping psychological constructs, and personal concern categories, and can accommodate user-defined dimensions as well. Easy to install and use, this software offers researchers in social, personality, clinical, and applied psychology a valuable tool for quantifying the rich but often slippery data provided in the form of personal narratives. The software comes complete on one 31/2 diskette and runs on any Windows-based computer.
Words are not just labels for conceptual categories. Words construct conceptual categories, frame situations and influence behavior. Where do they get their meaning? This book describes how words acquire their meaning. The author argues that mechanisms based on associations, pattern detection, and feature matching processes explain how words acquire their meaning from experience and from language alike. Such mechanisms are summarized by the distributional hypothesis, a computational theory of meaning originally applied to word occurrences only, and hereby extended to extra-linguistic contexts. By arguing in favor of the cognitive foundations of the distributional hypothesis, which suggests that words that appear in similar contexts have similar meaning, this book offers a theoretical account for word meaning construction and extension in first and second language that bridges empirical findings from cognitive and computer sciences. Plain language and illustrations accompany the text, making this book accessible to a multidisciplinary academic audience.
