Word senses

Across languages, most frequent words are also highly ambiguous, and carry multiple distinct but related senses of meaning. This chapter aims to explain why words have the particular senses that they do, discussing to what degree word senses are arbitrary cultural conventions or reflections of how speakers conceptualize the world around them. The chapter reviews theoretical proposals about the nature of word senses drawn from linguistics and psychology, and evaluates these proposals against a large recent body of experimental work on the topic. Finally, the chapter suggests that word senses reflect a balance between two communicative pressures: A pressure toward facilitating fast and efficient conversational exchanges, and one toward making languages easier for children to learn

How top-down processing enhances comprehension of noise-vocoded speech:Predictions about meaning are more important than predictions about form

Listeners quickly learn to understand speech that has been distorted, and this process is enhanced when comprehension is constrained by higher-level knowledge. In three experiments, we investigated whether this knowledge enhances comprehension of distorted speech because it allows listeners to predict (1) the meaning of the distorted utterance, or (2) the lower-level wordforms. Participants listened to question-answer sequences, in which questions were clearly-spoken but answers were noise-vocoded. Comprehension (Experiment 1) and learning (Experiment 2) were enhanced when listeners could use the question to predict the semantics of the distorted answer, but were not enhanced by predictions of answer form. Form predictions enhanced comprehension only when questions and answers were significantly separated by time and intervening linguistic material (Experiment 3). Together, these results suggest that high-level semantic predictions enhance comprehension and learning, with form predictions playing only a minimal role

Can item effects explain away the evidence for unconscious sound symbolism? An adversarial commentary on Heyman, Maerten, Vankrunkelsven, Voorspoels and Moors (2019)

status: Published onlin

Threat of war on cognitive development of refugee children

War trauma is often accompanied by poor living conditions in the new environment in a manner preserving or even deteriorating the negative influences of war. Several researchers have investigated the refugee experiences of displaced children. Often they have focused on the detrimental effects of war on psychological well-being, mental health, educational settings, social adaptation, quality of nutrition, financial difficulties, safety and language learning experiences. Each of these effects has been proven to negatively affect cognitive abilities; however, the current study reviews the key studies to reveal the cognitive and linguistic outcomes of holding refugee status in the early childhood period. Doing this, we aim to reveal the adverse conditions that affect refugee children’s three core abilities of executive functions, namely working memory, inhibitory control and shifting. In addition to cognitive outcomes, we present the factors that may affect these children’s mother tongue development and their experiences with the language spoken in the host country in the context of schooling. This study suggests that refugee children should be assessed for their cognitive and language abilities after arriving in the country of resettlement so that their needs can be identified and addressed effectively. Caretakers should also be given both psychological and financial support to enrich their children’s language and cognitive input. Also, the outcomes of the research in this field should be effectively shared with different stakeholders from the caregivers and teachers of the refugee children to the NGOs and policymakers responsible to take solid actions to counter the adverse effects of displacement

Subjective confidence influences word learning in a cross-situational statistical learning task

International audienceLearning is often accompanied by a subjective sense of confidence in one’s knowledge, a feeling of knowing what you know and how well you know it. Subjective confidence has been shown to guide learning in other domains, but has received little attention so far in the word learning literature. Across three word learning experiments, we investigated whether and how a sense of confidence in having acquired a word meaning influences the word learning process itself. First, we show evidence for a confirmation bias during word learning in a cross-situational statistical learning task: Learners who are highly confident they know the meaning of a word are more likely to persist in their belief than learners who are not, even after observing objective evidence disconfirming their belief. Second, we show that subjective confidence in a word meaning modulates inferential processes based on that word, affecting learning over the whole lexicon: Learners who hold high confidence in a word meaning are more likely to use that word to make mutual exclusivity inferences about the meaning of other words. We conclude that confidence influences word learning by modulating both information selection processes and inferential processes and discuss the implications of these results for word learning models