Lecture 8 - Semantics

Question 0

meanings of words

Answer 0

words refer to things in the outside world

but those aren’t their meanings

words are an agreement by speakers of a language to use that word that idea (unicorn)

not that words necessarily refer to physical things in the world, but to ideas

Question 1

What is semantics?

Answer 1

meaning!

Question 2

words are arbitrary

Answer 2

usually no dependence between the sound of the word and the meaning
- onomatopoeia (buzz)

signed languages can take adv of iconic hues

Question 3

word referent relationship is symbolic

Answer 3

word stands for the object its referring to

the word “stands for” for object

Question 4

debate sine Ancient Greece about whether word referent relationship is

Answer 4

non-arbitrary

Question 5

Children’s concepts and semantic features

Answer 5

how do they figure out what makes a dog? and correctly recognize new dogs?

barks, has fur, four legs, pants, etc…

certain features count more than others (barks instead of meows), example having fur or four legs isn’t as important

Question 6

prototypical concepts

Answer 6

you probably learn the prototypical concepts first, then extend to weirder stuff (robin vs. penguin)

subtypes of prototype theories:
- essential (necessary and sufficient) features that define categories: redness (does it have the necessary wavelenght), shapes (does it have 3 sides? it’s a triangle)

• or there aren’t n&s features, just more likely ones

Question 7

connecting words and concepts

Answer 7

kids have some concepts already before they start learning the words for them

still, a lot of concepts a word could apply to!
- Quine’s problem (the “gavagai” problem)

Question 8

there are a lot of concepts that in any give situation that a word could apply to

gavagain problem

Answer 8

a rabbit hops across the road: “gavagai!”

it could be a proper name, it could be dinner, danger, road,

possibilities not limited by the pointing and exclamation

child word learner has this same issue

Question 9

Joint attention

Answer 9

shared attention toward a region of physical space

by jointly paying attention to the same thing, that how kids learn the words for things

“look at the coffee!”

Question 10

association learning

Answer 10

DEBATE

word and object predict each other: non-specific to language mechanism

hearing a word predicts the presence of the object, and seeing the object predicts the presence of the word

cross-situational word learning: maybe the way kids learn the word ball, maybe they’re keeping track of across situations of the occurrence of this word in different situations: probability that a word is a word is higher when you can compare instances across situations (eye tracing of 12 months old - trained them to learn new words)

• results of the experiment: they are able to use association to begin to learn what words go with what objects