Words are the essence of communication: They are the building blocks of any language. Learning the meaning of words is thus one of the most important aspects of language acquisition: Children must first learn words before they can combine them into complex utterances. Many theories have been developed to explain the impressive efficiency of young children in acquiring the vocabulary of their language, as well as the developmental patterns observed in the course of lexical acquisition. A major source of disagreement (...) among the different theories is whether children are equipped with special mechanisms and biases for word learning, or their general cognitive abilities are adequate for the task. We present a novel computational model of early word learning to shed light on the mechanisms that might be at work in this process. The model learns word meanings as probabilistic associations between words and semantic elements, using an incremental and probabilistic learning mechanism, and drawing only on general cognitive abilities. The results presented here demonstrate that much about word meanings can be learned from naturally occurring child-directed utterances (paired with meaning representations), without using any special biases or constraints, and without any explicit developmental changes in the underlying learning mechanism. Furthermore, our model provides explanations for the occasionally contradictory child experimental data, and offers predictions for the behavior of young word learners in novel situations. (shrink)

We explore the following two cognitive questions regarding crosslinguistic variation in lexical semantic systems: Why are some linguistic categories—that is, the associations between a term and a portion of the semantic space—harder to learn than others? How does learning a language‐specific set of lexical categories affect processing in that semantic domain? Using a computational word‐learner, and the domain of color as a testbed, we investigate these questions by modeling both child acquisition of color terms and adult behavior on a non‐verbal (...) color discrimination task. A further goal is to test an approach to lexical semantic representation based on the principle that the more languages label any two situations with the same word, the more conceptually similar those two situations are. We compare such a crosslinguistically based semantic space to one based on perceptual similarity. Our computational model suggests a mechanistic explanation for the interplay between term frequency and the semantic closeness of learned categories in developmental error patterns for color terms. Our model also indicates how linguistic relativity effects could arise from an acquisition mechanism that yields language‐specific topologies for the same semantic domain. Moreover, we find that the crosslinguistically inspired semantic space supports these results at least as well as—and in some aspects better than—the purely perceptual one, thus confirming our approach as a practical and principled method for lexical semantic representation in cognitive modeling. (shrink)

While speakers have been shown to adapt to the knowledge state of their addressee in choosing referring expressions, they often also show some egocentric tendencies. The current paper aims to provide an explanation for this “mixed” behavior by presenting a model that derives such patterns from the probabilistic combination of both the speaker's and the addressee's perspectives. To test our model, we conducted a language production experiment, in which participants had to refer to objects in a context that also included (...) a visually misleading object whose function was either known to both partners, or known just to the speaker but not the addressee. Modeling results indicate that the experimental findings cannot be explained by assuming that speakers tailor a referring expression solely to their own perspective or to the perspective of their addressee. Instead, accounting for the behavioral pattern requires an approach where both perspectives influence the choice of referring expressions. Nevertheless, in our situation, speakers consider their partner's perspective more than their own. (shrink)

How children go about learning the general regularities that govern language, as well as keeping track of the exceptions to them, remains one of the challenging open questions in the cognitive science of language. Computational modeling is an important methodology in research aimed at addressing this issue. We must determine appropriate learning mechanisms that can grasp generalizations from examples of specific usages, and that exhibit patterns of behavior over the course of learning similar to those in children. Early learning of (...) verb argument structure is an area of language acquisition that provides an interesting testbed for such approaches due to the complexity of verb usages. A range of linguistic factors interact in determining the felicitous use of a verb in various constructions—associations between syntactic forms and properties of meaning that form the basis for a number of linguistic and psycholinguistic theories of language. This article presents a computational model for the representation, acquisition, and use of verbs and constructions. The Bayesian framework is founded on a novel view of constructions as a probabilistic association between syntactic and semantic features. The computational experiments reported here demonstrate the feasibility of learning general constructions, and their exceptions, from individual usages of verbs. The behavior of the model over the timecourse of acquisition mimics, in relevant aspects, the stages of learning exhibited by children. Therefore, this proposal sheds light on the possible mechanisms at work in forming linguistic generalizations and maintaining knowledge of exceptions. (shrink)

Lexical ambiguity—the phenomenon of a single word having multiple, distinguishable senses—is pervasive in language. Both the degree of ambiguity of a word (roughly, its number of senses) and the relatedness of those senses have been found to have widespread effects on language acquisition and processing. Recently, distributional approaches to semantics, in which a word's meaning is determined by its contexts, have led to successful research quantifying the degree of ambiguity, but these measures have not distinguished between the ambiguity of words (...) with multiple related senses versus multiple unrelated meanings. In this work, we present the first assessment of whether distributional meaning representations can capture the ambiguity structure of a word, including both the number and relatedness of senses. On a very large sample of English words, we find that some, but not all, distributional semantic representations that we test exhibit detectable differences between sets of monosemes (unambiguous words; N = 964), polysemes (with multiple related senses; N = 4,096), and homonyms (with multiple unrelated senses; N = 355). Our findings begin to answer open questions from earlier work regarding whether distributional semantic representations of words, which successfully capture various semantic relationships, also reflect fine‐grained aspects of meaning structure that influence human behavior. Our findings emphasize the importance of measuring whether proposed lexical representations capture such distinctions: In addition to standard benchmarks that test the similarity structure of distributional semantic models, we need to also consider whether they have cognitively plausible ambiguity structure. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 6, June 2022.

Volume 19, Issue 11, November 2019, Page 71-73.

This introduction highlights the themes that arise from The Missed: the productivity and negativity of unrealized potential and missed opportunity.

Sexual abuse by clergymen, poisoned water, police brutality—these cases each involve two wrongs: the abuse itself and the attempt to avoid responsibility for it. Our focus is this second wrong—the cover up. Cover ups are accountability failures, and they share common strategies for thwarting accountability whatever the abuse and whatever the institution. We find that cover ups often succeed even when accountability mechanisms are in place. Hence, improved institutions will not be sufficient to prevent accountability failures. Accountability mechanisms are tools (...) that people must be willing to use in good faith. They fail when people are complicit. What explains complicity? We identify certain human proclivities and features of modern organizations that lead people to become complicit in the wrongdoing of others. If we focus exclusively on the design of institutions, we will fail to constrain the perpetrators of wrongdoing. Understanding complicity is key to understanding accountability failures. (shrink)

A wider social stage -- Girls will be boys : gender, envy, and the Freudian social contract -- Anna-Antigone : experiments in group upbringing -- The defense of psychoanalysis/the anxiety of politics -- Conclusion : ego politics.

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

In "Aesthetic Histories" our contributors’ shared concern is the inspiring and confounding, healthy and uncomfortable and above all inevitable relationship between history and aesthetic praxis.

Gamification is an increasingly common marketing tool. Yet, to date, there has been little examination of its ethical implications. In light of the potential implications of this type of stealth marketing for consumer welfare, this paper discusses the ethical dilemmas raised by the use of gamified approaches to marketing. The paper draws on different schools of ethics to examine gamification as an overall system, as well as its constituent parts. This discussion leads to a rationale and suggestions for how gamification (...) could be regulated and/or controlled by more informal codes of conduct. The paper ends by outlining a practical framework which businesses can use to evaluate the potential ethical implications raised by their own gamified marketing techniques. (shrink)

Both Schutz and Gurwitsch describe reality as having a manifold character: Schutz speaks of “multiple realities” and Gurwitsch of “orders of existence”. Both hold that one realm of reality has a privileged status compared to the others: common everyday experience. However, in spite of this apparent convergence in their views, a closer reading of their various works reveal the important difference in what they understand under “common everyday experience”.For Schutz, it is the world of social action, characterized by him as (...) “paramount reality” because of the constitutive processes of the experiences of time, space, sociality and meaning involved in action. For Gurwitsch, the realm of common everyday experience represents the counterpart and the origin of the constructed realm of science: therein lies its status of “paramount reality”. But what it really refers to is not ordinary experience, as most of his statements suggest, but pre-predicative experience, wherefrom the categories of the natural sciences, namely space and time, originate. Gurwitsch speaks of this pre-predicative experience, which he also calls primordial experience, as being essentially perceptual experience. However, he limits perceptual experience to sensory perception, leaving out the symbolic, social and action-related components of perception and becomes thus inconsistent with his adherence to the dismissal of the constancy hypothesis in his field theory of consciousness. The dismissal of the constancy hypothesis implies the recognition of the appresentational structures involving symbols, action and Others as inherent components of every perception. Schutz disagrees with Gurwitsch's reduction of the life-world Erlebnisse to sensory perception and this issue becomes the core of their debate on the phenomenon of “paramount reality”. (shrink)

Pediatric palliative care is specialized medical care for children who live with serious and life-limiting illnesses, with the central goal to improve quality of life for both children and their families. Presently, a majority of pediatric palliative care referrals are based on the traditional consultative model, in which primary providers serve as the gatekeepers to palliative care access. It is well-known that racial and ethnic healthcare disparities exist across the continuum of care, fraught with healthcare providers’ biases that impact the (...) care delivered. This includes the referral practices, allocation and utilization of palliative care services, and leaving vulnerable children and families with potentially unmet palliative care needs. We make the moral argument that the establishment of standard referral criteria for pediatric palliative care services is one simple step that must be taken to begin to address and hopefully ameliorate the impact of providers’ biases and disparities that exist within pediatric palliative care. (shrink)

The least infringement principle has been widely endorsed by public health scholars. According to this principle, public health policies may infringe upon “general moral considerations” in order to achieve a public health goal, but if two policies provide the same public health benefit, then policymakers should choose the one that infringes least upon “general moral considerations.” General moral considerations can encompass a wide variety of goals, including fair distribution of burdens and benefits, protection of privacy and confidentiality, and respect for (...) autonomy.In this article, we argue that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's 2006 HIV screening recommendations may violate the least infringement principle. This is a concern because, although not legally binding, the Recommendations appear to have already influenced state laws and will likely continue to do so as legislative proposals continue to be passed. At a minimum, therefore, the Recommendations have important implications for HIV screening within the United States. (shrink)

The interpretation given by Craik and Lockhart of the findings by Hyde and Jenkins involving supposed depth of incidental-task processing on subsequent word recall is brought into question by the tenets of logical learning theory. It is shown that Craik and Lockhart overlooked the possible role of oppositionality in this research. An alternative explanation relying on an oppositional context and predication is offered. Two experiments present evidence supporting the hypothesis that oppositionality in an incidental task facilitates subsequent word recall . (...) In both experiments, the importance of taking a subject's meaningful understanding of the task instruction into consideration is highlighted. The discussion contrasts Boolean "binary" disjunction with the logic of oppositionality. It is shown how oppositionality allows us to conceptualize a testable theory of human agency. (shrink)

Constantine Zurayk, one of the most important Arab thinkers of the twentieth century, has examined and reflected on the principal political events and cultural crises of the period. His main philosophical theses are seen in relation to the "Kulturphilosophie" of turn-of-the-century German thinkers, in particular to the philosophies of life of Dilthey, Nietzsche, and Simmel and to the Neo-Kantian thought of Ernst Cassirer. Both the virtues and shortcomings of Zurayk's philosophy of culture, especially in the Arab context, are seen in (...) his distinction between, and elaboration on, the descriptive and normative approaches to culture. (shrink)

This article analyzes U.S. court cases involving reproductive technologies in terms of their implications for reproductive choice, mothers' versus fathers' rights, definitions and evaluations of parenting, and the nuclear family structure. The analysis reveals that the courts have tended not to recognize how social conditions shape women's reproductive choices, to promote fathers' rights more than mothers' rights, to ignore the social relationships that constitute childbearing and child rearing and value men's over women's biological contribution to these processes, to reflect certain (...) assumptions about the proper roles of mothers and fathers, and to privilege the nuclear family. The implications of developing reproductive technology policy for an understanding of the relationships among gender, reproductive technologies, and the state are considered, and recommendations for the equitable regulation of these technologies are offered. (shrink)

This Handbook addresses Chaucer's poetry in the context of several disciplines, including late medieval philosophy and science, Mediterranean culture, comparative European literature, vernacular theology, and popular devotion.

We do not know how much clinical physicians carrying out clinical trials in oncology and haematology struggle with ethical concerns. To our knowledge, no empirical research exists on these questions in a Nordic context. Therefore, this study aims to learn what kinds of ethical challenges physicians in Sweden, Denmark and Finland (n = 29) face when caring for patients in clinical trials; and what strategies, if any, they have developed to deal with them. The main findings were that clinical cancer (...) trials pose ethical challenges related to autonomy issues, unreasonable hope for benefits and the therapeutic misconception. Nevertheless, some physicians expressed that struggling with such challenges was not of great concern. This conveys a culture of hope where health care professionals and patients uphold hope and mutually support belief in clinical trials. This culture being implicit, physicians need opportunities to deliberately reflect over the characteristics that should constitute this culture. (shrink)

The contributors to this volume offer, in the light of specialised knowledge of leading philosophers of the ancient world, answers to the question: how are we to read and understand the surviving texts of Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Augustine?