Understanding natural language

This paper describes a computer system for understanding English. The system answers questions, executes commands, and accepts information in an interactive English dialog.     

Understanding the language of thought

Conclusions To conclude then, our question was, What determines the content of a thought? This question gets its punch by being set against the background assumption that thoughts are internal physical occurrences. The answer I have proposed is that thoughts can be classified in four importantly different ways. Introspection yields syntactic categories. These are important for cognitive processing, but they do not correspond to contents. A second way of categorizing thoughts is in terms of narrow content. This is determined by the functional role of the thought in rational architecture together with the way in which that rational architecture is tied to the world through input correlations. Narrow contents are indexical, so to get truth bearers we must augment the narrow contents with the values of the indexical parameters. Propositional content can be taken to consist of pairs of narrow contents and values for indexical parameters. Finally, thoughts can be classified in terms of that clauses. This kind of classification does not uniquely determine propositional content, but describes it in a more general way.     

Understanding the centrality deficit: Insight from foreign language learners

This study replicated and extended a phenomenon in the text memory literature referred to as the centrality deficit Miller & Keenan (Annals of Dyslexia 59:99–113, 2009). It examined how reading in a foreign language (L2) affects one’s text representation and ability to recall the most important information. Readers recalled a greater proportion of central than of peripheral ideas, regardless of whether reading in their native language (L1) or a foreign language (L2). Nonetheless, the greatest deficit in participants’ L2 recalls, as compared with L1 recalls, was on the central, rather than the peripheral, information. This centrality deficit appears to stem from resources being diverted from comprehension when readers have to devote more cognitive resources to lower level processes (e.g., L2 word identification and syntactic processing), because the deficit was most evident among readers who had lower L2 proficiency. Prior knowledge (PK) of the passage topic helped compensate for the centrality deficit. Readers with less L2 proficiency who did not have PK of the topic displayed a centrality deficit, relative to their L1 recall, but this deficit dissipated when they did possess PK.     

Understanding the architecture of language: the possible role of neurology

Culicover and Jackendoff have recently described an approach to language representation where semantic structure works, alongside syntax, as a generative system with its own structure and principles of composition. Well-known neurological observations support this view. They show that in the presence of a syntactic impairment, comprehension can take place but only if the sentence's semantic structure is rich enough. This would suggest the existence of syntax-independent semantic combinatorial mechanisms, as Culicover and Jackendoff's model proposes.     

Understanding reading as a form of language-use: A language game hypothesis

Reading research and research on conversation have followed different paths: While the research program for reading committed itself to a relatively static view of language, where objective text properties serve to elicit specific effects on cognition and behavior of a reader, research on conversation has embraced a language-use perspective, where language is primarily seen as a dynamic, context dependent process. In this essay I contrast these two perspectives, and argue that in order to reach a unified understanding of natural language – be it reading, talking, or conversing – one needs to adopt a language-use perspective. Furthermore, I describe how reading can be seen as a form of language-use, and how the current landscape of research on reading can be re-interpreted in terms of a dynamic, context-sensitive perspective on language. In particular, I propose that the concept of ‘language games’ serves as a good starting point to conceive reading as a form of language-use, describe how one can derive first concrete hypotheses by re-interpreting reading in terms of language games, and show how they can be readily operationalized using tools from dynamic systems analysis.     

H.M.'s personal crossword puzzles: Understanding memory and language

The amnesic patient H.M. has been solving crossword puzzles nearly all his life. Here, we analysed the linguistic content of 277 of H.M.'s crossword-puzzle solutions. H.M. did not have any unusual difficulties with the orthographic and grammatical components inherent to the puzzles. He exhibited few spelling errors, responded with appropriate parts of speech, and provided answers that were, at times, more convincing to observers than those supplied by the answer keys. These results suggest that H.M.'s lexical word-retrieval skills remain fluid despite his profound anterograde amnesia. Once acquired, the maintenance of written language comprehension and production does not seem to require intact medial temporal lobe structures.     

Understanding the language of reasoning: Cognitive,linguistic, and developmental influences

Certain linguistic structures imply speakers' beliefs about their utterances. Factuals imply that the speaker's hypothesis matches observed data; counterfactuals suggest that hypotheses and observations differ, and uncertainty implies that unclear observations make many hypotheses tenable. We examined how age(11-and 16-year-olds and college students) and syntactic structure (subordinating conjunctions, cognitive verbs, and verb modifications) affect the ability to specify the hypothetical and observational referents of expressions of factual, counterfactual, and uncertainty beliefs. There was considerable linguistic growth during adolescence. College students outperformed the younger students. Age differences were most pronounced on judging the hypothetical referents of counterfactuals and uncertainty structures. The two precollege groups often misinterpreted counterfactuals and uncertainty structures because they equated hypotheses with observations. They seldom understood that uncertainty meant that more than one hypothesis could account for observations. Verb modifications were easier to interpret than cognitive verbs, and subordinating conjunctions were hardest. Factuals were easier than counterfactuals and uncertainty structures.     

Understanding action language modulates oscillatory mu and beta rhythms in the same way as observing actions

The mu rhythms (8–13 Hz) and the beta rhythms (15 up to 30 Hz) of the EEG are observed in the central electrodes (C3, Cz and C4) in resting states, and become suppressed when participants perform a manual action or when they observe another’s action. This has led researchers to consider that these rhythms are electrophysiological markers of the motor neuron activity in humans. This study tested whether the comprehension of action language, unlike abstract language, modulates mu and low beta rhythms (15–20 Hz) in a similar way as the observation of real actions. The log-ratios were calculated for each oscillatory band between each condition and baseline resting periods. The results indicated that both action language and action videos caused mu and beta suppression (negative log-ratios), whereas abstract language did not, confirming the hypothesis that understanding action language activates motor networks in the brain. In other words, the resonance of motor areas associated with action language is compatible with the embodiment approach to linguistic meaning.     

Understanding Narratively,Understanding Alterity

Phenomenology's systematic exploration of how a world comes into existence for knowers – knowers who are often conceptualized as individual and ostensibly isolated – requires that it provide some account of the constitution of alterity. In this paper, I address this issue by arguing that we apperceive alterity in terms of the intentionality of behavior. A corollary of this argument is that the apperception of an alter as specifically human is a secondary attribution, following the primary apperception of intention. I further argue that the intentionality of behavior is understood through the projection of a narrative frame, or a “protonarrative,” onto the alter's behavior. I suggest that protonarrativity is the form that experience takes as its ontological condition. Our living is not simply known to us reflectively as protonarrative; rather, experience is lived as protonarrative.This essay is based on a paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences, Memphis, Tennessee, October 28–30, 2004.     

Infant artificial language learning and language acquisition

The rapidity with which children acquire language is one of the mysteries of human cognition. A view held widely for the past 30 years is that children master language by means of a language-specific learning device. An earlier proposal, which has generated renewed interest, is that children make use of domain-general, associative learning mechanisms. However, our current lack of knowledge of the actual learning mechanisms involved during infancy makes it difficult to determine the relative contributions of innate and acquired knowledge. A recent approach to studying this problem exposes infants to artificial languages and assesses the resulting learning. In this article, we review studies using this paradigm that have led to a number of exciting discoveries regarding the learning mechanisms available during infancy. These studies raise important issues with respect to whether such mechanisms are general or specific to language, the extent to which they reflect statistical learning versus symbol manipulation, and the extent to which such mechanisms change with development. The fine-grained characterizations of infant learning mechanisms that this approach permits should result in a better understanding of the relative contributions of, and the dynamic between, innate and learned factors in language acquisition.     

Genes, language development, and language disorders

Genetic factors are important contributors to language and learning disorders, and discovery of the underlying genes can help delineate the basic neurological pathways that are involved. This information, in turn, can help define disorders and their perceptual and processing deficits. Initial molecular genetic studies of dyslexia, for example, appear to converge on defects in neuronal and axonal migration. Further study of individuals with abnormalities of these genes may lead to the recognition of characteristic cognitive deficits attributable to the neurological dysfunction. Such abnormalities may affect other disorders as well, and studies of co-morbidity of dyslexia with attention deficit disorder and speech sound disorder are helping to define the scope of these genes and show the etiological and cognitive commonalities between these conditions. The genetic contributions to specific language impairment (SLI) are not as well defined at this time, but similar molecular approaches are being applied to identify genes that influence SLI and comorbid disorders. While there is co-morbidity of SLI with dyslexia, it appears that most of the common genetic effects may be with the language characteristics of autism spectrum disorders rather than with dyslexia and related disorders. Identification of these genes and their neurological and cognitive effects should lay out a functional network of interacting genes and pathways that subserve language development. Understanding these processes can form the basis for refined procedures for diagnosis and treatment.     

Neural aspects of second language representation and language control

A basic issue in the neurosciences of language is whether an L2 can be processed through the same neural mechanism underlying L1 acquisition and processing. In the present paper I review data from functional neuroimaging studies focusing on grammatical and lexico-semantic processing in bilinguals. The available evidence indicates that the L2 seems to be acquired through the same neural structures responsible for L1 acquisition. This fact is also observed for grammar acquisition in late L2 learners contrary to what one may expect from critical period accounts. However, neural differences for an L2 may be observed, in terms of more extended activity of the neural system mediating L1 processing. These differences may disappear once a more 'native-like' proficiency is established, reflecting a change in language processing mechanisms: from controlled processing for a weak L2 system (i.e., a less proficient L2) to more automatic processing. The neuroimaging data reviewed in this paper also support the notion that language control is a crucial aspect specific to the bilingual language system. The activity of brain areas related to cognitive control during the processing of a 'weak' L2 may reflect competition and conflict between languages which may be resolved with the intervention of these areas.     

Time in language: event duration in language comprehension

This work investigates how we process and represent event duration in on-line language comprehension. Specifically, it examines how events of different duration are processed and what type of knowledge underlies their representations. Studies 1–4 examined verbs and phrases in different contexts. They showed that durative events took longer to process than non-durative events and that the duration attributed to the stimulus events correlated with on-line processing times. Studies 5 and 6 indicated that durative events occur in semantically more diverse contexts and elicit semantically more diverse associations than non-durative events. Semantic and contextual diversity also correlated with attributed durations and processing times. Results indicate that (a) event-specific durations are computed on-line from multiple unfolding cues, (b) processing cost and duration representations emerge from semantic and contextual diversity reflecting our experience, and (c) key components of duration representations may be situation-specific knowledge of causal and contingency relations between events.     

Persistent structural priming from language comprehension to language production

To examine the relationship between syntactic processes in language comprehension and language production, we compared structural persistence from sentence primes that speakers heard to persistence from primes that speakers produced. [Bock, J. K., & Griffin, Z. M. (2000). The persistence of structural priming: transient activation or implicit learning? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 177-192.] showed that the production of target priming structures increased the probability of spontaneously using the same structures to describe events in subsequent pictures that were semantically unrelated to the primes. These priming effects persisted across as many as ten intervening filler trials. The present studies replicated these results using auditorily presented primes to which participants only listened. The results indicated persistence of priming across all lags, with relative magnitudes of priming as large as those observed by Bock and Griffin. The implication is that structural priming is persistent regardless of the modality in which language structures are experienced, underscoring the power of priming as an implicit learning mechanism.