TY - JOUR
T1 - Symbol Grounding and Meaning
T2 - A Comparison of High-Dimensional and Embodied Theories of Meaning
AU - Glenberg, Arthur M.
AU - Robertson, David A.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by a grant to Arthur Glenberg from the University of Wisconsin—Madison Graduate School Research Committee, Project 990288, and a National Institute of Mental Health (T32-MH18931) predoctoral traineeship to David Robertson. This work benefited substantially from contributions of the students in the Honors Seminar in Cognitive Psychology (1997/1998) who helped with the design of the experiments, construction of the stimuli, and data collection. Those students were Christopher Amadon, Brianna Benjamin, Jennifer Dolland, Jeanette Hegyi, Katherine Kortenkamp, Erik Kraft, Nathan Pruitt, Dana Scherr, Sara Steinberg, and Brad Thiel. We thank Curt Burgess and two anonymous reviewers for comments on the manuscript.
PY - 2000/10
Y1 - 2000/10
N2 - Latent Semantic Analysis (Landauer & Dumais, 1997) and Hyperspace Analogue to Language (Burgess & Lund, 1997) model meaning as the relations among abstract symbols that are arbitrarily related to what they signify. These symbols are ungrounded in that they are not tied to perceptual experience or action. Because the symbols are ungrounded, they cannot, in principle, capture the meaning of novel situations. In contrast, participants in three experiments found it trivially easy to discriminate between descriptions of sensible novel situations (e.g., using a newspaper to protect one's face from the wind) and nonsense novel situations (e.g., using a matchbook to protect one's face from the wind). These results support the Indexical Hypothesis that the meaning of a sentence is constructed by (a) indexing words and phrases to real objects or perceptual, analog symbols; (b) deriving affordances from the objects and symbols; and (c) meshing the affordances under the guidance of syntax.
AB - Latent Semantic Analysis (Landauer & Dumais, 1997) and Hyperspace Analogue to Language (Burgess & Lund, 1997) model meaning as the relations among abstract symbols that are arbitrarily related to what they signify. These symbols are ungrounded in that they are not tied to perceptual experience or action. Because the symbols are ungrounded, they cannot, in principle, capture the meaning of novel situations. In contrast, participants in three experiments found it trivially easy to discriminate between descriptions of sensible novel situations (e.g., using a newspaper to protect one's face from the wind) and nonsense novel situations (e.g., using a matchbook to protect one's face from the wind). These results support the Indexical Hypothesis that the meaning of a sentence is constructed by (a) indexing words and phrases to real objects or perceptual, analog symbols; (b) deriving affordances from the objects and symbols; and (c) meshing the affordances under the guidance of syntax.
KW - Meaning; language; embodiment; computational models; Latent Semantic Analysis; Hyperspace Analogue to Language
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U2 - 10.1006/jmla.2000.2714
DO - 10.1006/jmla.2000.2714
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0000296953
SN - 0749-596X
VL - 43
SP - 379
EP - 401
JO - Journal of Memory and Language
JF - Journal of Memory and Language
IS - 3
ER -