Semantic Similarity of Alternatives Fostered by Conversational Negation

Conversational negation often behaves differently from negation as a logical operator: when rejecting a state of affairs, it does not present all members of the complement set as equally plausible alternatives, but it rather suggests some of them as more plausible than others (e.g., “This is not a dog, it is a wolf/*screwdriver”). Entities that are semantically similar to a negated entity tend to be judged as better alternatives (Kruszewski et al., 2016). In fact, Kruszewski et al. (2016) show that the cosine similarity scores between the distributional semantics representations of a negated noun and its potential alternatives are highly correlated with the negated noun-alternatives human plausibility ratings. In a series of cloze tasks, we show that negation likewise restricts the production of plausible alternatives to similar entities. Furthermore, completions to negative sentences appear to be even more restricted than completions to an affirmative conjunctive context, hinting at a peculiarity of negation.     

Ghost stories

This essay reflects on the exclusions and invisibilities that haunt academic subjectivities, spaces, and research practices. The exclusion criteria that delimit both scholars and scholarship are not natural or fair; they are the expressions of classed, raced, gendered, and ableist ideals, that privilege separation, order, and certainty. That which is marked as other – the remainder, which must not or cannot be admitted – is not fully excluded, but lurks at or below the waterline of legibility, disrupting academic bodies and departments with its persistent, often affective traces. Rather than trying to explain something that is primarily characterized by its inexplicability, the author brings readers into her department, to try to show them the ghosts that she has (not quite) seen, in order to appeal for more humane, inclusive, ghost-friendly ways of being and working in the academy.     

Language knowledge and event knowledge in language use

This paper examines how semantic knowledge is used in language comprehension and in making judgments about events in the world. We contrast knowledge gleaned from prior language experience (“language knowledge”) and knowledge coming from prior experience with the world (“world knowledge”). In two corpus analyses, we show that previous research linking verb aspect and event representations have confounded language and world knowledge. Then, using carefully chosen stimuli that remove this confound, we performed four experiments that manipulated the degree to which language knowledge or world knowledge should be salient and relevant to performing a task, finding in each case that participants use the type of knowledge most appropriate to the task. These results provide evidence for a highly context-sensitive and interactionist perspective on how semantic knowledge is represented and used during language processing.     

The many facets of speech production and its complex effects on phonological processing

In our commentary, we discuss two additional points about developmental speech production. First, we suggest that more precision is needed to accurately describe ‘speech production’ processes, and we suggest that hierarchical constructs from the adult literatures on articulatory phonology and speech motor control may be applicable to infants as well. Second, we discuss the implications from data that indicate that the effects of production are subject to task‐, attentional‐, linguistic‐, and experience‐related demands.