WORDS ABOUT WORDS ABOUT SPECIES

A word about words.

The title of my paper comes from an essay by Václav Havel. In his essay, Havel addressed most evocatively the question of the unique power of words for thinking and to influence, for good or for harm, as well as to inform and to educate. As analysts our medium is the word. I suggest that it is of inestimable importance that we are able to listen deeply to our patients' words and to be aware of ...

Frank words about breast screening

A growing body of evidence suggests that the benefits achieved by screening for breast cancer are small, that the harm from the overdiagnosis of breast cancer arising from screening is substantial, and that, where screening is available, the observed reductions in breast cancer mortality arise largely from increased awareness and improved chemoand hormone therapy.1 In spite of these new insight...

What Homophones Say about Words

The number of potential meanings for a new word is astronomic. To make the word-learning problem tractable, one must restrict the hypothesis space. To do so, current word learning accounts often incorporate constraints about cognition or about the mature lexicon directly in the learning device. We are concerned with the convexity constraint, which holds that concepts (privileged sets of entitie...

Learning individual words and learning about words simultaneously

Children are guided by constraints and biases in word learning. In the case of the shape bias—the tendency to extend count nouns by similarity in shape—previous findings have revealed that learning plays an important role in its development (e.g., Smith et al., 2002). Some have proposed that children acquire inductive constraints like the shape bias by making inferences about observed data on m...

A dictionary of words about alcohol.