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Where Words Get their Meaning: Cognitive processing and distributional modelling of word meaning in first and second language
Marianna Bolognesi
[Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research 23] 2020
► pp. vii–x

Table of contents

Acknowledgements XI
Chapter 1.Word power 1
1.1Introduction 1
1.2Outline of the book 5
1.3What this book is about and what it leaves out 8
1.4A final remark on the parallel between human and artificial mind 9
Part 1.Word meaning construction and representation in the human mind
Chapter 2.Word meaning mental representation 13
2.1Learning words: A developmental perspective 13
2.2Cross-situational learning 16
2.3Words denoting abstract vs. concrete concepts 21
2.4How words construct meaning 26
2.5Summary 30
Chapter 3.Word meaning extension: Deriving new meanings from old ones 33
3.1Word meaning representation and conceptual representation 33
3.2Meaning extension by polysemy 36
3.3Meaning extension by metonymy 40
3.4Meaning extension by metaphor 45
3.5Summary XI
Chapter 4.The bilingual mind and the bilingual mental lexicon 55
4.1Theoretical models of the bilingual mental lexicon 55
4.2Word associations in native speakers and language learners 59
4.3Incidental vocabulary leaning 60
4.4Statistical learning based on crossing linguistic contexts and crossing situations 62
4.5Pattern detection: A hallmark of human cognition 65
4.6Summary 72
Part 2.Word meaning construction and representation in the artificial mind
Chapter 5.Distributional models and Word embeddings 77
5.1You shall know a word by the company it keeps 77
5.2Constructing distributional models 82
5.3Macro types of distributional models 88
5.3.1Structured and unstructured models 88
5.3.2Explicit and implicit vectors 89
5.4From frequency-based models to word embeddings 91
5.5Summary 95
Chapter 6.Evaluating distributional models 97
6.1Evaluating distributional models against psychological data 97
6.2Learning associations by conditioning 100
6.3Associative and discriminative learning 101
6.4Grounded and ungrounded symbols 105
6.5Word meaning in native speakers, language learners, and distributional models 107
6.6Summary 114
Chapter 7.Distributional models beyond language 117
7.1Word meaning is both, embodied and symbolic 117
7.2Multimodal representation of word meaning 119
7.3Flickr Distributional Tagspace, a distributional model based on annotated images 122
7.4From word-to-world to world-to-world modelling 127
7.5Summary XI
Part 3.Converging evidence in language and communication research
Chapter 8.Where words get their meaning 135
8.1How language and experience construct categories 135
8.2Word-to-world associations in constructing the meaning of words denoting concrete and abstract concepts 139
8.3Word-to-word associations in constructing the meaning of words denoting concrete and abstract concepts 142
8.4Word meaning organization in L1 and L2 145
8.5Summary 148
Chapter 9.The cognitive foundations of the distributional hypothesis 149
9.1Leaving the Chinese room and climbing the ladder of abstraction 149
9.2The distributional hypothesis applied to metaphor 157
9.3The distributional hypothesis applied to metonymy 160
9.4The power of language as a driving force to abstraction 163
9.5Summary 166
Chapter 10.Conclusions and outlook 169
10.1AI behaviorism: Learning how the mind constructs word meaning by looking at how machines do it 169
10.2Practical implications for the study of human creativity 173
10.3Practical implications for the study of first language acquisition 175
10.4Practical implications for learning and teaching a foreign language 178
10.5Outlook 181
References 185
Index 207


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