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221
Human simulation of vocabulary learning
- Cognition
, 1999
"... The work reported here experimentally investigates a striking generalization about vocabulary acquisition: Noun learning is superior to verb learning in the earliest moments of child language development. The dominant explanation of this phenomenon in the literature invokes differing conceptual requ ..."
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Cited by 197 (8 self)
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The work reported here experimentally investigates a striking generalization about vocabulary acquisition: Noun learning is superior to verb learning in the earliest moments of child language development. The dominant explanation of this phenomenon in the literature invokes differing conceptual requirements for items in these lexical categories: Verbs are cognitively more complex than nouns and so their acquisition must await certain mental developments in the infant. In the present work, we investigate an alternative hypothesis; namely, that it is the information requirements of verb learning, not the conceptual requirements, that crucially determine the acquisition order. Efficient verb learning requires access to structural features of the exposure language and thus cannot take place until a scaffolding of noun knowledge enables the acquisition of clause-level syntax. More generally, we experimentally investigate the hypothesis that vocabulary acquisition takes place via an incremental constraint-satisfaction procedure that bootstraps itself into successively more sophisticated linguistic representations which, in turn, enable new kinds of vocabulary learning. If the experimental subjects were young children, it would be difficult to distinguish between this information-centered hypothesis and the conceptual change hypothesis. Therefore the experimental learners are adults. The items to be “acquired ” in the experiments were the 24 most frequent nouns and 24 most frequent verbs
Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture
, 1994
"... Core architecture and domain specificity ..."
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Reuniting perception and conception.
- Cognition,
, 1998
"... Abstract Work in philosophy and psychology has argued for a dissociation between perceptuallybased similarity and higher-level rules in conceptual thought. Although such a dissociation may be justified at times, our goal is to illustrate ways in which conceptual processing is grounded in perception ..."
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Cited by 113 (16 self)
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Abstract Work in philosophy and psychology has argued for a dissociation between perceptuallybased similarity and higher-level rules in conceptual thought. Although such a dissociation may be justified at times, our goal is to illustrate ways in which conceptual processing is grounded in perception, both for perceptual similarity and abstract rules. We discuss the advantages, power and influences of perceptually-based representations. First, many of the properties associated with amodal symbol systems can be achieved with perceptually-based systems as well (e.g. productivity). Second, relatively raw perceptual representations are powerful because they can implicitly represent properties in an analog fashion. Third, perception naturally provides impressions of overall similarity, exactly the type of similarity useful for establishing many common categories. Fourth, perceptual similarity is not static but becomes tuned over time to conceptual demands. Fifth, the original motivation or basis for sophisticated cognition is often less sophisticated perceptual similarity. Sixth, perceptual simulation occurs even in conceptual tasks that have no explicit perceptual demands. Parallels between perceptual and conceptual processes suggest that many mechanisms typically associated with abstract thought are also present in perception, and that perceptual processes provide useful mechanisms that may be co-opted by abstract thought.
Toward a psychology of human agency
- Perspectives on Psychological Science
, 2006
"... ABSTRACT—This article presents an agentic theory of hu-man development, adaptation, and change. The evolu-tionary emergence of advanced symbolizing capacity enabled humans to transcend the dictates of their imme-diate environment andmade them unique in their power to shape their life circumstances a ..."
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Cited by 106 (1 self)
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ABSTRACT—This article presents an agentic theory of hu-man development, adaptation, and change. The evolu-tionary emergence of advanced symbolizing capacity enabled humans to transcend the dictates of their imme-diate environment andmade them unique in their power to shape their life circumstances and the courses their lives take. In this conception, people are contributors to their life circumstances, not just products of them. Social cog-nitive theory rejects a duality between human agency and social structure. People create social systems, and these systems, in turn, organize and influence people’s lives. This article discusses the core properties of human agency, the different forms it takes, its ontological and epistemological status, its development and role in causal structures, its growing primacy in the coevolution process, and its influ-ential exercise at individual and collective levels across diverse spheres of life and cultural systems. Conceptions of human nature have changed markedly over time. In the early theological conceptions, human nature was ordained by original divine design. Evolutionism transformed the con-ception to one in which human nature is shaped by environ-mental pressures acting on random gene mutations and reproductive recombinations. This nonteleological process is devoid of deliberate plans or purposes. The symbolic ability to comprehend, predict, and alter the course of events confers considerable functional advantages. The evolutionary emer-gence of language and abstract and deliberative cognitive ca-pacities provided the neuronal structure for supplanting aimless environmental selection with cognitive agency. Human fore-bears evolved into a sentient agentic species. Their advanced symbolizing capacity enabled humans to transcend the dictates of their immediate environment and made them unique in their power to shape their life circumstances and the course of their lives. Through cognitive self-regulation, humans can create visualized futures that act on the present; construct, evaluate, and modify alternative courses of action to secure valued out-comes; and override environmental influences. In a later sec-tion, this article discusses the growing ascendancy of human agency in the coevolution process through the force of social and technological evolution.
The parallel distributed processing approach to semantic cognition
, 2003
"... How do we know what properties a thing has, and which of its properties should be generalized to other objects? How is the knowledge underlying these abilities acquired, and how is it affected by brain disorder? Our approach to these issues is based on the idea that cognitive processes arise from th ..."
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Cited by 93 (8 self)
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How do we know what properties a thing has, and which of its properties should be generalized to other objects? How is the knowledge underlying these abilities acquired, and how is it affected by brain disorder? Our approach to these issues is based on the idea that cognitive processes arise from the interactions of neurons via synaptic connections. The knowledge in such parallel distributed processing systems is stored in the strengths of the connections and is acquired gradually through the course of life experience. Degredation of semantic knowledge occurs through degredation of the patterns of neural activity that probe the knowledge stored in the connections. Simulation models based on these ideas capture semantic cognitive processes and their development and disintegration, encompassing domain-specific patterns of generalization in young children and the restructuring of conceptual knowledge as a function of experience. How do we know that Socrates is mortal? Aristotle answered this question by suggesting that we use two propositions: (2) Socrates is a man. (2) All men are mortal. This classical sylogism forms the
Comparison in the development of categories.
- Cognitive Development
, 2000
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When Push comes to Shove: A Computational Model of the Role of Motor Control in the Acquisition of Action Verbs
, 1997
"... Children learn a variety of verbs for hand actions starting in their second year of life. The semantic distinctions can be subtle, and they vary across languages, yet they are learned quickly. Howis this possible? This dissertation explores the hypothesis that to explain the acquisition and use of a ..."
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Cited by 74 (1 self)
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Children learn a variety of verbs for hand actions starting in their second year of life. The semantic distinctions can be subtle, and they vary across languages, yet they are learned quickly. Howis this possible? This dissertation explores the hypothesis that to explain the acquisition and use of action verbs, motor control must be taken into account. It presents a model of embodied semantics|based on the principles of neural computation in general and on the human motor system in particular|which takes a set of labelled actions and learns both to label novel actions and to obey verbal commands. Akey feature of the model is the executing schema, anactivecontroller mechanism which, by actually driving behavior, allows the model to carry out verbal commands. A hard-wired mechanism links the activity of executing schemas to a set of linguistically important features including hand posture, joint motions, force, aspect and goals. The feature set is relatively small and is xed, helping to make learning tractable. Moreover, the use of traditional feature structures facilitates the use of model merging, a Bayesian probabilistic learning algorithm which rapidly learns plausible word meanings, automatically determines an appropriate number of senses for each verb, and can plausibly be mapped to a connectionist recruitment
Understanding spatial relations: Flexible infants, lexical adults
- Cognitive Psychology
, 2003
"... Concepts of containment, support, and degree of fit were investigated using nonverbal, pref-erential-looking tasks with 9- to 14-month-old infants and adults who were fluent in either En-glish or Korean. Two contrasts were tested: tight containment vs. loose support (grammaticized as in and on in ..."
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Cited by 64 (4 self)
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Concepts of containment, support, and degree of fit were investigated using nonverbal, pref-erential-looking tasks with 9- to 14-month-old infants and adults who were fluent in either En-glish or Korean. Two contrasts were tested: tight containment vs. loose support (grammaticized as in and on in English by spatial prepositions and kkita and nohta in Korean by spatial verbs) and tight containment vs. loose containment (both grammaticized as in in English but separately as kkita and nehta in Korean). Infants categorized both contrasts, suggesting conceptual readiness for learning such spatial semantics in either language. English-speaking adults categorized tight containment vs. loose support, but not tight vs. loose containment. However, Korean-speaking adults were successful at this latter contrast, which is lexicalized in their language. The adult data suggest that some spatial relations that are salient during the preverbal stage become less salient if language does not systematically encode them.
