HOME   ::  Conference List   ::   Conference Paper
Colunga, E. and Gasser, M. (1998) Linguistic Relativity and Word Acquisition: A Computational Approach. In Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pages 244--249.
Bookmark:  

Full-text
   URL: ftp://ftp.cs.indiana.edu/pub/gasser/PS/cogsci98.ps.Z
   Cached: PDF-67K    PS-162K    PS.gz-45K   
   SAVE AS an easy-to-recall long filename:
      Filename format: author--year--title   PDF-67K    PS-45K    :: About GZip'd PS
      Filename format: author--year--title--journal|proceedings|...--pages   PDF-67K    PS-45K   

Related links
   CiteSeer: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/colunga98linguistic.html
  Web search: Google Web Search   ::   Google Scholar
  Within this site: References (27)

Paper at a Glance 

Linguistic Relativity and Word Acquisition: A Computational Approach
Eliana Colunga (ECOLUNGA@CS.INDIANA.EDU)
Michael Gasser (GASSER@CS.INDIANA.EDU)
Computer Science Department
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN 47405
Abstract Language plays a pervasive role in our day­to­day experience and is likely to have an effect on other non­linguistic aspects of life. At the same time, language is itself constrained by the world. In this paper we study this interaction using Playpen, a connectionist model of the acquisition of word meaning. We argue that the interaction between linguistic and non­linguistic categories depends on the pattern of correlations in the world and on their relation to the correlations defined by words. We then discuss three kinds of possible interactions and present simulations of each using Playpen, a neural­network model of the acquisition of word meaning.
Introduction Language plays a pervasive role in our day­to­day experi­ ence. Thus it is no surprise that people wonder to what extent language in general and the particular language one speaks affect the rest of our cognitive abilities. Does language af­ fect thought; that is, do linguistic categories influence general cognitive categories? More generally, how do linguistic and non­linguistic categories interact? The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis, associated most closely with Benjamin Lee Whorf (Whorf, 1956), concerns the first question. The claim, in its strongest form, is that lin­ guistic categories exert a direct influence on general cognitive categories. Since Whorf, many researchers have attempted to find evidence for this influence (see Lucy (1996) for a re­ view), but there is as yet no agreement that the evidence has been found. People have usually studied the effect of language on cog­ nition by looking for differences in adult speakers of different languages. Negative results (Rosch, 1973; Kay & McDaniel, 1978) are met with the arguments that the experiments are biased towards Indo­ ...
BibTex
@inproceedings{colunga98linguisticRelativity,
  author={Eliana Colunga and M. Gasser},
  title={Linguistic Relativity and Word Acquisition: A Computational Approach},
  year={1998},
  pages={244-249},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/colunga98linguisticRelativity.html}
}

 HOME   ::  Conference List   ::   Conference Paper Comments to: junwang4 you-know-at gmail.com Last update: 2/2/08