Thematic roles: Core knowledge or linguistic construct?

L Rissman, A Majid - Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2019 - Springer
The status of thematic roles such as Agent and Patient in cognitive science is highly
controversial: To some they are universal components of core knowledge, to others they are …

Cultural influences on word meanings revealed through large-scale semantic alignment

B Thompson, SG Roberts, G Lupyan - Nature Human Behaviour, 2020 - nature.com
If the structure of language vocabularies mirrors the structure of natural divisions that are
universally perceived, then the meanings of words in different languages should closely …

Polysemy: Pragmatics and sense conventions

R Carston - Mind & Language, 2021 - Wiley Online Library
Polysemy, understood as instances of a single linguistic expression having multiple related
senses, is not a homogenous phenomenon. There are regular (apparently, rule‐based) …

From language development to language evolution: A unified view of human lexical creativity

T Brochhagen, G Boleda, E Gualdoni, Y Xu - Science, 2023 - science.org
A defining property of human language is the creative use of words to express multiple
meanings through word meaning extension. Such lexical creativity is manifested at different …

The implications of polysemy for theories of word learning

M Srinivasan, H Rabagliati - Child Development Perspectives, 2021 - Wiley Online Library
Word learning is typically studied as a problem in which children need to learn a single
meaning for a new word. And by most theories, children's learning is itself guided by the …

Conceptual relations predict colexification across languages

Y Xu, K Duong, BC Malt, S Jiang, M Srinivasan - Cognition, 2020 - Elsevier
In natural language, multiple meanings often share a single word form, a phenomenon
known as colexification. Some sets of meanings are more frequently colexified across …

[HTML][HTML] When do languages use the same word for different meanings? The Goldilocks principle in colexification

T Brochhagen, G Boleda - Cognition, 2022 - Elsevier
Lexical ambiguity is pervasive in language, and often systematic. For instance, the Spanish
word dedo can refer to a toe or a finger, that is, these two meanings colexify in Spanish; and …

Conceptual similarity and communicative need shape colexification: An experimental study

A Karjus, RA Blythe, S Kirby, T Wang… - Cognitive …, 2021 - Wiley Online Library
Colexification refers to the phenomenon of multiple meanings sharing one word in a
language. Cross‐linguistic lexification patterns have been shown to be largely predictable …

Children make use of relationships across meanings in word learning.

S Floyd, AE Goldberg - Journal of Experimental Psychology …, 2021 - psycnet.apa.org
Many words are associated with more than a single meaning. Words are sometimes
“ambiguous,” applying to unrelated meanings, but the majority of frequent words are …

Contextualized word embeddings encode aspects of human-like word sense knowledge

S Nair, M Srinivasan, S Meylan - arxiv preprint arxiv:2010.13057, 2020 - arxiv.org
Understanding context-dependent variation in word meanings is a key aspect of human
language comprehension supported by the lexicon. Lexicographic resources (eg, WordNet) …