Search results for "Linguistics"

Do Grading Gray Stimuli Help to Encode Letter Position?

2021

Numerous experiments in the past decades recurrently showed that a transposed-letter pseudoword (e.g., JUGDE) is much more wordlike than a replacement-letter control (e.g., JUPTE). Critically, there is an ongoing debate as to whether this effect arises at a perceptual level (e.g., perceptual uncertainty at assigning letter position of an array of visual objects) or at an abstract language-specific level (e.g., via a level of “open bigrams” between the letter and word levels). Here, we designed an experiment to test the limits of perceptual accounts of letter position coding. The stimuli in a lexical decision task were presented either with a homogeneous letter intensity or with a graded gra…

Naming organic wines in French and German A Frame Semantics analysis

2019

International audience; [Context]Naming a product is giving it an identity (Lobin, 2016); when it comes to wines it is offering them, the possibility to be easily discriminated and to catch the clients’ attention. This contribution aims at analyzing the naming of organic wines in two countries: France and Germany. If naming generic wines has already been investigated especially from a lexical point of view (Herling, 2015), wine names from the organic wine industry have for the time being been left aside. In the meantime, previous studies based on authentic materials have underlined, since Lehrer, 1975, some specificities in the wine language like resorting to prototypes (Gautier & Bach, 201…

A cognitive architecture for artificial vision

1997

Abstract A new cognitive architecture for artificial vision is proposed. The architecture, aimed at an autonomous intelligent system, is cognitive in the sense that several cognitive hypotheses have been postulated as guidelines for its design. The first one is the existence of a conceptual representation level between the subsymbolic level, that processes sensory data, and the linguistic level, that describes scenes by means of a high level language. The conceptual level plays the role of the interpretation domain for the symbols at the linguistic levels. A second cognitive hypothesis concerns the active role of a focus of attention mechanism in the link between the conceptual and the ling…

Why Untrained Control Groups Provide Invalid Baselines: A Reply to Dienes and Altmann

2003

Dienes and Altmann argue that an untrained control group provides a reliable baseline to measure artificial grammar learning. In this reply, we first provide a fictitious example to demonstrate that this assessment is faulty. We then analyse why this assessment is wrong, and we reiterate the solution proposed in Reber and Perruchet (this issue) for a proper control. Finally, we point out the importance of these methodological principles in the context of implicit learning studies. In their comment, Dienes and Altmann (this issue) raise two main concerns. First, they argue that any difference in classification between an experimental group and an untrained control group reflects the fact tha…

Review of Carruthers (2006): The Architecture of the Mind

2010

More Support for More-Support

2009

This book provides the most comprehensive account so far of novel and hitherto unexplained factors operative in the choice between synthetic ( prouder ) and analytic ( more proud ) comparatives. It argues that the underlying motivation in using the analytic variant is to mitigate processing demands – a compensatory strategy referred to as more -support. The analytic variant is claimed to be better suited to environments of increased processing complexity – presumably owing to its ability to facilitate early phrase structure recognition, the more transparent one-to-one relation between form and function and possibly because the degree marker more can serve as a structural signal foreshadowin…

Missing the Forest for the Trees: Why Cognitive Science Circa 2019 Is Alive and Well

2019

International audience; Núñez and colleagues (2019) chronicle in extraordinary detail the "demise" of cognitive science, as it was first defined in the late 1970s. The problem is that their account, however accurate, misses the forest for the trees. Cognitive science circa 2019 is alive and well; it just has not followed the path anticipated by its founders over 40 years ago.

Understanding color vision, with comments on mind and matter

2012

Much is known about the mental and physical aspects of color vision. Color vision, therefore, is a paradigm well suited for the discussion of the relationship between mind and matter. The aim of the present chapter is to support the proposition that mental affairs cannot be adequately understood if their neurobiological aspects are neglected. Although it is possible to focus on fundamental problems of general relevance when discussing mind and matter, this chapter will deal with specific observations rather than general issues. The possibility of generalizations derived from empirical results is always limited. Provided the conditions under which these observations were made can be confirme…

Overt and hidden complexity – Two types of complexity and their implications

2014

AbstractLinguistic complexity is the result of the two motivations of explicitness and economy. Most approaches focus on the exlpicitness side of complexity (overt complexity) but there is also an explicitness-oriented side to complexity (hidden complexity). The aim of the paper is to introduce hidden complexity as the neglected side of complexity and to discuss the issues of trade-offs, global complexity and equal complexity from a more encompassing perspective that integrates overt and hidden complexity.

A Formalism Supplementing Cognitive Semantics Based on Mereology

2007

ABSTRACT This paper is motivated by and aims to supplement Cognitive Semantics. Details of this latter prominent approach within contemporary linguistic research will not be discussed here. Rather, we focus on a formalization of the concept of Gestalt and provide a formal semantics that can be used to interpret a certain formal language (LM 0) with respect to a universe of structured wholes (Gestalts). Since a great deal of the analyses of linguistic organization that has been provided by Cognitive Semantics since the mid-1970s is based on the concept of Gestalt, the semantics unfolded in the following may be viewed as an attempt to provide a starting point for supplementing the yet informa…