Integration of Action and Language Knowledge: A Roadmap for Developmental Robotics

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Word Learning in 6-16 Month Old Infants

Understanding words requires infants to not only isolate words from the speech around them and delineate concepts from their world experience, but also to establish which words signify which concepts, in all and only the right set of circumstances. Previous research places the onset of this ability around infants\u27 first birthdays, at which point they have begun to solidify their native language phonology, and have learned a good deal about categories, objects, and people. In this dissertation, I present research that alters this accepted timeline. In Study 1, I find that by 6 months of age, infants demonstrate understanding of around a dozen words for foods and body parts. Around 13-14 months of age, performance increases significantly. In Study 2, I find that for a set of early non-nouns, e.g. `uh-oh\u27 and `eat\u27, infants do not show understanding until 10 months, but again show a big comprehension boost around 13-14 months. I discuss possible reasons for the onset of noun-comprehension at 6 months, the relative delay in non-noun comprehension, and the performance boost for both word-types around 13-14 months. In Study 3, I replicate and extend Study 1\u27s findings, showing that around 6 months infants also understand food and body-part words when these words are spoken by a new person, but conversely, by 12 months, show poor word comprehension if a single vowel in the word is changed, even when the speaker is highly familiar. Taken together, these results suggest that word learning begins before infants have fully solidified their native language phonology, that certain generalizations about words are available to infants at the outset of word comprehension, and that infants are able to learn words for complex object and event categories before their first birthday. Implications for language acquisition and cognitive development more broadly are discussed

CLiFF Notes: Research in the Language Information and Computation Laboratory of The University of Pennsylvania

This report takes its name from the Computational Linguistics Feedback Forum (CLIFF), an informal discussion group for students and faculty. However the scope of the research covered in this report is broader than the title might suggest; this is the yearly report of the LINC Lab, the Language, Information and Computation Laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania. It may at first be hard to see the threads that bind together the work presented here, work by faculty, graduate students and postdocs in the Computer Science, Psychology, and Linguistics Departments, and the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. It includes prototypical Natural Language fields such as: Combinatorial Categorial Grammars, Tree Adjoining Grammars, syntactic parsing and the syntax-semantics interface; but it extends to statistical methods, plan inference, instruction understanding, intonation, causal reasoning, free word order languages, geometric reasoning, medical informatics, connectionism, and language acquisition. With 48 individual contributors and six projects represented, this is the largest LINC Lab collection to date, and the most diverse

Semantic analysis of the use classifiers in Tagbana

L’examen de la littérature concernant le phénomène des classificateurs dans les langues africaines en général et en particulier dans la langue Tagbana, révèle que l’emploi des classificateurs dans le discours est envisagé sous l’angle d’un accord purement morphologique lié à une perspective syntaxique qui fait abstraction des fondements sémantiques, voire conceptuels qui caractérisent ces emplois. Envisageant, pour notre part, le phénomène sous l’angle des conditions cognitives qui déterminent l’emploi des classificateurs dans le discours, en rapport avec les cadres d’investigations de la psychomécanique et de la grammaire cognitive, il a été démontré dans cette thèse que les classificateurs k, l, m, p, t, et w dénotent une fonction cognitive fondamentale: la structuration du domaine référentiel sur la base de six (06) catégories conceptuelles: Le concept de l’animé désigné par la forme w; Le concept de l’inanimé désigné par la forme k; Le concept de discontinuité désigné par la forme l; Le concept de d’homogénéité désigné par la forme m; Le concept du pluriel ayant rapport avec la neutralisation des individualités au profit de l’ensemble perçu comme un tout désigné par la forme t; Le concept du pluriel ayant rapport avec la conservation des individualités au sein du groupe désigné par la forme p. Ces catégories conceptuelles conditionnent et rendent explicite toute conceptualisation dont est capable le locuteur au regard des données de l’expérience. Dans leur apports conceptuel et sémantique à la définition des référents du discours, les classificateurs expriment le genre et le nombre tels qu’envisagés par le locuteur.An examination of the literature on this topic of classifiers in African languages reveals that in general the use of classifiers has been treated as conditioned by a pure morphological process, independent of any semantic and conceptual basis. Viewing the phenomenon from the perspective of the mental conditions underpinning the use of classifiers in discourse, within both the Guillaumean and cognitive grammar frameworks, it has been demonstrated that classifiers have a cognitive function: they structure the experiential domain of Tagbana speaker into six conceptual categories. Investigations into the uses of the classifier k, l, m, p, t, and w in discourse indicate that there are six conceptual categories through which Tagbana speakers view the input from the universe of experience: The concept of high-scale animacy designated by the classifier w; The concept of inanimacy designated by the classifier k; The concept of discontinuity designated by the classifier l; The concept of homogeneity designated by the classifier m; The concept of plurality with loss of individuation designated by the classifier t; The concept of plurality with maintenance of individuation designated by p. These mental categories allow the speakers’ conceptualizations of any experiential entity. A classifier can be defined, therefore, as a linguistic means which allows and makes explicit the speaker’s conceptualization of the experiential entity being talked about

Visibility and argument identification : a conceptual semantic approach to Alamblak and Japanese

This study attempts to combine the Government and Binding (GB) theory and Conceptual Semantics to provide an account for problems in the basic grammatical structures of Alamblak and some topics of Japanese. The thesis assumes Jackendovian Conceptual Semantics but aims to propose an alternative theory which establishes the relationship between syntax and semantics with maximum principles and minimum stipulations. The main concepts of the theory are argument identification and visibility. First, I introduce binary conceptual structure, whereby the hierarchical relationship among conceptual arguments is structurally defined and the distinction between inner arguments and outer arguments is represented. Second I make a distinction between identifier and identifiee by introducing the functional classification of syntactic categories. Identifiers are conceptually Functions, whereas identifiees are Basic Categories. PPs and APs are classified as Functions, i.e. identifiers. I also propose a theory of argument identification, which unifies the Conceptual Structures of an identifier and an identifiee under government and predication. It is proposed that the unification of two identifiers is carried out by argument sharing. This enables us to eliminate the specification of identifiers from the syntactic selectional information registered in the lexical specifications of verbs, e.g. locational verbs and motion verbs, for example, do not syntactically specify that they select a PP. In chapter one, it is suggested that what was formerly considered to represent syntactic selectional information (Predicte Argument Structure or Argument Structure) is radically reduced and that a (P)AS only represents the ability of a verb to identify an identifiee under government. In chapter three, the concept of syntacticisation patterns is introduced. Syntacticisation patterns derive the argumentidentifying abilities of verbs from their lexical conceptual specifications (LCS), where syntacticisation patterns are subject to parametric variations. The introduction of syntacticisation patterns completely eliminates the syntactic selectional specification in unmarked cases. The amount of the information specified in the lexical entries of verbs is minimised. Chapters one and three offer a concrete solution to the question of how syntactic structures are determined on the basis of semantic specifications of lexical items. Chapter four discusses one of the basic problems of Alamblak, agreement and possessor raising. Second or “object” agreement markers are described as incorporated pronouns. The complete complementarity of second agreement markers and overt objects is accounted for by the theory of unification. It also discusses the fact that the argument relations indicated by second agreement markers do not a have grammatical function, i.e. that they are conceptually interpreted without having a grammatical function. This fact is described only in Conceptual Semantic approaches to grammar. Possessor raising is characterised as a construction involving the modification of selectional information. The theory of argument identification gives a coherent account of the construction. Chapters five and six discuss “visibility”. The distinction of identifier and identifiee leads to a fundamental understanding of the concept of “visibility”. The basic concept of visibility proposed is that an identifiees must be visible for conceptual unification, whereas identifiers are not. Person-Number-Gender markers in Alamblak are visibility markers which are manifested only on identifiees but not on identifiers. Since they do not indicate the grammatical relations of NPs, the function of visibility marking is not to identify grammatical relations. The theory of unification proposed here provides a coherent account of the problems of visibility

Compounding in Namagowab and English: (exploring meaning creation in compounds)

This essay investigates compounding in Namagowab and English, which belong to two widely divergent groups of languages, the Khoesan and Indo-European, respectively. The first motive is to investigate how and why new words are created from existing ones. The reading and data interpretation seeks an understanding of word formation and an overview of semantic compositionality, structure and productivity, within the broad context of cognitive, lexicalist and distributed morphology paradigms. This coupled with history reading about the languages and its people, is used to speculate about why compounds feature in lexical creation. Compounding is prevalent in both languages and their distance in terms of phylogenetic relationships should allow limited generalizing about these processes of formation. Word lists taken from dictionaries in both languages were analyzed by entering the words in Excel spreadsheets so that various attributes of these words, such as word type, compound class (Noun, Verb, Preposition, Adjective and Adverb) and constituent class could be counted, and described with formulae, and compound and constituent meaning analyzed. The conclusion was that socio historical factors such as language contact, and aspects of cognition such as memory and transparency, account for compounding in a language in addition to typology

Can humain association norm evaluate latent semantic analysis?

This paper presents the comparison of word association norm created by a psycholinguistic experiment to association lists generated by algorithms operating on text corpora. We compare lists generated by Church and Hanks algorithm and lists generated by LSA algorithm. An argument is presented on how those automatically generated lists reflect real semantic relations

Aspects of the Grammar of Eastern Khanty

A reference grammar of the endangered indigenous dialects of Vasyugan and Alexandrovo Eastern Khanty of the Uralic language family is the study based on the corpus of natural narrative discourse, and is set in a general cognitive -functional paradigm. The description addresses the main patterns of the Eastern Khanty language system and offers typological contextualization of the reviewed language data. The description covers the issues in phonology (backness vowel harmony, consonant-vowel harmony), word-classes, morphology (derivation and inflection), syntax and semantics of simple and complex clauses (typical SOV patterns with occasional non-canonical argument ergative marking against the general background of Nom-Acc system and robust use of non-finite and finite constructions as relative, adverbial and complement clauses)