Children acquire exact meanings for number words in distinct stages. First, they learn one, then two, and then three and sometimes four. Finally, children learn to apply the counting procedure to their entire count list. Although these stages are ubiquitous and well documented, the foundation of these meanings remains highly contested. Here we ask whether children assign preliminary meanings to...

Cross-species comparison of great ape gesturing has so far been limited to the physical form of gestures in the repertoire, without questioning whether gestures share the same meanings. Researchers have recently catalogued the meanings of chimpanzee gestures, but little is known about the gesture meanings of our other closest living relative, the bonobo. The bonobo gestural repertoire overlaps ...

Speech comprehension involves recovering a speaker’s intended meaning from the speech sounds that they produce. While sensory-driven components of this process have been widely investigated, impact content (i.e., linguistic information) on sensory processing is much less understood. Here we summarize growing body research demonstrating neural influenced by morpheme- and word-level statistical p...

The general problem area of machine translation has been outlined and related to other fields of language-data processing in Garvin's “A Linguist's View of Language-data Processing.” It has been discussed in some detail in the two immediately preceding sections by Hays and Harper. This discussion will deal more specifically with the question of syntax: both with the place of syntax in the over-...

Semantic theories of natural language associate meanings with utterances by providing meanings for lexical items and rules for determining the meaning of larger units given the meanings of their parts. Meanings are often assumed to combine via function application, which works well when constituent structure trees are used to guide semantic composition. However, we believe that the functional s...

Gernsbacher (1984) found that number of word meanings (polysemy) did not influence lexical decision time when it was operationalized as number of dictionary definitions. This finding supports her contention that subjects do not store all possible dictionary meanings for words in memory. The present experiments extended Gernsbacher's research by determining whether more psychologically valid mea...

Semantic theories of natural language associate meanings with utterances by providing meanings for lexical items and rules for determining the meaning of larger units given the meanings of their parts. Traditionally, meanings are combined via function composition, which works well when constituent structure trees are used to guide semantic composition. More recently, the functional structure of...

One of the fundamental problems of theoretical mysticism is how to explain the difference between God and the world on the basis of the idea of wahdat al-wujud (the unity of existence). Following the explanation of certain necessary premises, this paper presents the theory of divine manifestation as one that can explain and analyze multiplicity. In this article we especially seek t...

In acquiring word meanings, learners are often confronted by a single word form that is mapped to two or more meanings. For example, long after how to roller-"skate", one may learn that "skate" is also a kind of fish. Such learning of new meanings for familiar words involves two potentially contrasting processes, relative to new form-new meaning learning: 1) Form-based familiarity may facilitat...