Human Lexicon Research Articles

A Braver New World? Of chatbots and other cognoscenti

The 1920s mark the rise of robots in the human lexicon. Karel Capek, a Czech playwright, wrote R. U. R., which stands for Rossumovi Univerzalnı Roboti or Rossum's Universal Robots. The word for worker or labourer in Czech is robota; Karel was given the idea for this word by his artist brother Josef, and the word robot for a humanmanufactured humanoid entity was born in 1920. November 30, 2022, just over a century later, was when ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer), a chat robot, chatter bot or advanced chatbot, was made available by the company OpenAI for free download.

COMPUTER PROCESSING OF THE RESULTS FREE ASSOCIATION EXPERIMENT (based on information received from the British and Poles reactions to stimuli with the semantics of resilience)

The article presents the results of the free associative experiment conducted with the help of STIMULUS based on the reactions to stimuli with the semantics of resilience given by Englishmen and Poles and their psycholinguistic interpretation. Firstly, the authors describe the methodology used in the free associative experiment. In particular, they provide general characteristics of the questionnaire define stimuli (English crisis, crash, stress, pandemic, trauma / Polish kryzys, upadek, stres, pandemia, uraz), characterize the main participants of the free associative experiment (200 respondents, among which there are 75 Englishmen (representatives of Great Britain) and 125 Poles (representatives of the Republic of Poland)) aged 17-23 and 31-39), outline the stages of working out the reactions of Englishmen and Poles to stimuli with the semantics of resilience. Secondly, it is proven that the free associative experiment is aimed at studying the psycholinguistic meaning of a word, its categorical and objective meaning, the specificity of the meaning of some words, the reference words of comparative constructions, the connections between words, the organization of the human lexicon. Thirdly, the preparatory, practical and analytical operational stages of working with STIMULUS are described in detail according to the responses given by the English and Poles. Finally, the psycholinguistic interpretation of the responses to stimuli with the semantics of resilience with an emphasis on the coincidence of semes (from archisemes to differential semes) was carried out to confirm the respondents’ thinking with the help of synonymous associations.

Beyond the Benchmarks: Toward Human-Like Lexical Representations.

To process language in a way that is compatible with human expectations in a communicative interaction, we need computational representations of lexical properties that form the basis of human knowledge of words. In this article, we concentrate on word-level semantics. We discuss key concepts and issues that underlie the scientific understanding of the human lexicon: its richly structured semantic representations, their ready and continual adaptability, and their grounding in crosslinguistically valid conceptualization. We assess the state of the art in natural language processing (NLP) in achieving these identified properties, and suggest ways in which the language sciences can inspire new approaches to their computational instantiation.

Human language evolution: a view from theoretical linguistics on how syntax and the lexicon first came into being

Human language is a multi-componential function comprising several sub-functions each of which may have evolved in other species independently of language. Among them, two sub-functions, or modules, have been claimed to be truly unique to the humans, namely hierarchical syntax (known as “Merge” in linguistics) and the “lexicon.” This kind of species-specificity stands as a hindrance to our natural understanding of human language evolution. Here we challenge this issue and advance our hypotheses on how human syntax and lexicon may have evolved from pre-existing cognitive capacities in our ancestors and other species including but not limited to nonhuman primates. Specifically, we argue that Merge evolved from motor action planning, and that the human lexicon with the distinction between lexical and functional categories evolved from its predecessors found in animal cognition through a process we call “disintegration.” We build our arguments on recent developments in generative grammar but crucially depart from some of its core ideas by borrowing insights from other relevant disciplines. Most importantly, we maintain that every sub-function of human language keeps evolutionary continuity with other species’ cognitive capacities and reject a saltational emergence of language in favor of its gradual evolution. By doing so, we aim to offer a firm theoretical background on which a promising scenario of language evolution can be constructed.

Ways of Representation of Word Meanings in Human Lexicon

Ways of Representation of Word Meanings in Human Lexicon

Co-evolution of internalization and externalization in the emergence of the human lexicon

AbstractThere has been a long-standing controversy in the context of language evolution on whether the original function of human language was internal thought or external communication. However, given the fact that language clearly serves both functions, internalization and externalization must have been co-evolutionarily acted in the emergence of human language. This article proposes a theoretical hypothesis about this co-evolutionary relationship of internalization and externalization, which especially explains the emergence of the human lexicon. To discuss the evolution of language from a comprehensive perspective, this article proposes a promising model that integrates two approaches with different standpoints: generative grammar and cognitive linguistics. This paper also examines the definition and nature of the lexicon and lexical items based on this integrated model. The hypothesis presented here demonstrates that the co-evolutionary work of internalization and externalization has been involved in two processes in the development of the lexicon: the establishment of syntactic objects (lexical items) and the improvement of creativity responsible for the expansion of lexicon size. The main conclusion is that these processes have formed a positive feedback loop and provided our lexicon with complex and unique properties.

Linguistic consciousness of the bilingual Evenks of Yakutia (on the material of adjectives denoting character traits of a human)

The subject of this research is the content of images of linguistic consciousness of the Evenks who do not have a command of the native language. The goal consists in determination of the peculiarities of linguistic consciousness of the Evenks of Yakutia who do not have a command of the native language. Methodological framework of this research is comprised of the relevant works in the area of language contacts of modern linguists, as well as the works dedicated to the Evenki-Yakut and Yakut-Russian interaction. Works by the scholars of the Moscow Psycholinguistic School became fundamental in describing the worldview of the Evenks.  The conducted sociopsycholinguistic comparative research of the ethnocultural specificity of adjectives denoting character traits of a human in the Evenki language allows determining the general and the particular, indicating the differences between the cultures and their ethnic specificity. The reconstructed via associative experiment model of lexicon represents the system of intersecting associative fields. The associative ties between the units of human lexicon are based on the main types of linguistic relations (paradigmatic, syntagmatic, derivational), as well as o extra-linguistic experience of a person, are the basis of associative relations between the units of the human lexicon. For example, associative fields is the method of externalization of consciousness, which helps in the analysis of linguistic consciousness, processes of production and perception of speech. The content of associative fields in different languages points at either similarity or discrepancy of the worldviews of different cultures. The acquired results of may be valuable for further comparative and area studies of languages of the peoples of the North that are under risk of extinction, as well as in studying linguistic consciousness, cross-cultural communication, linguoculturological research, theory of translation, and in special courses on problems of linguistics.

Linguopsychological Analysis of the Characters of Guy De Maupassant on the Example of Short Story “Pierrot”

The article considers the distinctive features and specificity of the style of French novelist master Guy de Maupassant. By conducting a deep analysis of the novel “Pierrot”, the writers had set a goal to demonstrate how psychological realism and subjective attitude to the surrounding world are reflected in the author’s work. The writer manages to emphasize the strengths and weaknesses of the natures of his characters via lexical means. In the novel “Pierrot” Maupassant emphasizes the description of the psychological profiles of the characters. The relevance of the topic of the article is attached by the fact that at the present time there is a lack of research in the field of linguopsychological analysis of the works of French literature of the XIX century. In philology, one of the significant problems is the issue of understanding and interpreting texts. The research was conducted as part of areal linguistics — the sphere of the dynamically developing scientific direction. The main method used for the selection of practical material was the linguistic method of continuous sampling. Apart from that, the conceptual analysis of lexicographic sources was used. The way of reconstruction of the human lexicon, the analysis of lexical and grammatical structures, which the writer uses when describing the images and actions of characters, allow the authors to open the lexical and semantic connections existing in the consciousness of the person. The forms and methods of linguopsychological analysis of the work of art considered in the article allow to better understand the meaning of the author's text. They also contribute to the transfer of the author's vision of reality, the reconstruction of the images of his characters and the atmosphere in which the actions unfold. The objectives of the study are to establish some basic concepts for French culture and to analyze linguistic and stylistic language tools.

Self-Concept Schemata Organization to Cope With Social Stressors: A Chronometric Assessment

A sample of 583 individuals of different ages and from different social and cultural backgrounds took part in a semantic priming study to explore their self-concept and self-esteem mental organization and structure in the human lexicon. Findings yielded by separating the sample into four groups showed that age and cultural background affect how humans organize self-esteem content and structure. Specifically, word recognition of physical attributes related to self-esteem provides support for the idea of a fractured mental representation of the self to cope with demands of ideal body stereotypes. It is suggested that meaning formation related to physical self is different from that based on abstract self-concept and self-esteem. This conceptual organization seems to help individuals to cope with ideal body stereotype demands and to avoid possible psychological disorders related to self-esteem affecting the so-called schematic individuals.

The First Philosophical Word

Abstract All questions of thought lead back to philosophy. However, there remains a lack of clarity with regard to the preconditions of philosophy, especially the genesis of philosophy, that is, what is the first philosophical topic is not much clearer. It is often thought that philosophizing stems from being, or a state of existence, a legend from Greek philosophy. This paper attempts to reanalyze the precondition or the critical point of “how thinking is possible” by an archaeology of thought, so as to pinpoint the first word that initiated human thought. The first thinking word must be a philosophical word. In examining historical conditions, oracle bone scripts and basic connectives in mathematical logic, this paper argues that human thought stemmed from negative words that are the first philosophical words. The trajectory is that negatives, upon entering the human lexicon, inspired the concept of possibility; only with various possibilities, consciousness begins to think freely, put forward issues worth being reflected and deliberated and provide different alternative answers. In short, the advent of the negative “no” marked the existence of the critical condition of thinking, i. e., thinking and philosophy started when the human being could say no, which is therefore the first term and the primary topic of philosophy.

Organizational Principles of Abstract Words in the Human Brain

words constitute nearly half of the human lexicon and are critically associated with human abstract thoughts, yet little is known about how they are represented in the brain. We tested the neural basis of 2 classical cognitive notions of abstract meaning representation: by linguistic contexts and by semantic features. We collected fMRI BOLD responses for 360 abstract words and built theoretical representational models from state-of-the-art corpus-based natural language processing models and behavioral ratings of semantic features. Representational similarity analyses revealed that both linguistic contextual and semantic feature similarity affected the representation of abstract concepts, but in distinct neural levels. The corpus-based similarity was coded in the high-level linguistic processing system, whereas semantic feature information was reflected in distributed brain regions and in the principal component space derived from whole-brain activation patterns. These findings highlight the multidimensional organization and the neural dissociation between linguistic contextual and featural aspects of abstract concepts.

Liberty and Diversity: An Example of the Garden State Variety: Lipp v. Morris, 579 F.2d 834 (1978)

One of the hallowed, if not hackneyed, words in the human lexicon is "liberty." To many, the term implies a positive concept-- the freedom to do something, not as a privilege but as a right. But there are multiple dimensions to the concept of liberty. It can also imply a negative freedom, a right NOT to do something; or to decline to undertake a certain course of action or conduct. It has been a part of our history since the establishment of New Jersey. From the rich and varied history of this Garden State, thereby lies an unusual tale of liberty and diversity. The focus of this talks concerns the Pledge of Allegiance, or POA.In its original form, this paper was presented at the New Jersey Forum at Kean University on November 21, 2014.

Better explanations of lexical and semantic cognition using networks derived from continued rather than single-word associations

In this article, we describe the most extensive set of word associations collected to date. The database contains over 12,000 cue words for which more than 70,000 participants generated three responses in a multiple-response free association task. The goal of this study was (1) to create a semantic network that covers a large part of the human lexicon, (2) to investigate the implications of a multiple-response procedure by deriving a weighted directed network, and (3) to show how measures of centrality and relatedness derived from this network predict both lexical access in a lexical decision task and semantic relatedness in similarity judgment tasks. First, our results show that the multiple-response procedure results in a more heterogeneous set of responses, which lead to better predictions of lexical access and semantic relatedness than do single-response procedures. Second, the directed nature of the network leads to a decomposition of centrality that primarily depends on the number of incoming links or in-degree of each node, rather than its set size or number of outgoing links. Both studies indicate that adequate representation formats and sufficiently rich data derived from word associations represent a valuable type of information in both lexical and semantic processing.

A Prospect for Evolutionary Adequacy: Merge and the Evolution and Development of Human Language

Biolinguistic minimalism seeks a deeper explanation of the design, development and evolution of human language by reducing its core domain to the bare minimum including the set-formation operation Merge. In an attempt to open an avenue of research that may lead to an evolutionarily adequate theory of language, this article makes the following proposals: (i) Merge is the elementary combinatorial device that requires no more decomposition; (ii) the precursor to Merge may be found in the uniquely human capacity for hierarchical object manipulation; (iii) the uniqueness of the human lexicon may also be captured in terms of Merge. Empirical validations of these proposals should constitute one major topic for the biolinguistic program.

Object Category Acquisition by Dynamic Touch

The acquisition of object categories which underlie the human lexicon is a prerequisite for domestic robots to communicate with users in a human-like manner. The theory of J. J. Gibson inspires the approach to obtain shared categories through interaction with the shared environment, where explorative behaviors of infants play the role of obtaining distinctive features of objects to shape their categories. Although several existing studies have reproduced the exploratory behaviors of infants by robots to investigate their roles in acquiring such categories, those active categorization methods utilized static touches and the recognition tended to fail by changes of contact conditions. This paper introduces another possible approach to object categorization — object category acquisition by dynamic touch. Dynamic touch (e.g., shaking) provides the agent with the information of the whole object to enable quick and robust recognition. The amplitude spectrum of auditory data which humans obtain during shaking is found to be an effective feature for identifying the object categories of differing dynamics, e.g., rigid objects, paper materials and bottles of water, even though the objects within each category vary in size, shape, amount and contact conditions. Experimental results are given to show the validity of the proposed method and future issues are discussed.