Month: July 2021

Semantic Similarity of Alternatives Fostered by Conversational Negation

Abstract Conversational negation often behaves differently from negation as a logical operator: when rejecting a state of affairs, it does not present all members of the complement set as equally plausible alternatives, but it rather suggests some of them as more plausible than others (e.g., “This is not a dog, it is a wolf/*screwdriver”). Entities […]

Published on July 21, 2021

A Systematic Investigation of Gesture Kinematics in Evolving Manual Languages in the Lab

Abstract Silent gestures consist of complex multi-articulatory movements but are now primarily studied through categorical coding of the referential gesture content. The relation of categorical linguistic content with continuous kinematics is therefore poorly understood. Here, we reanalyzed the video data from a gestural evolution experiment (Motamedi, Schouwstra, Smith, Culbertson, & Kirby, 2019), which showed increases […]

Published on July 21, 2021

Emotional Valence Precedes Semantic Maturation of Words: A Longitudinal Computational Study of Early Verbal Emotional Anchoring

Abstract We present a longitudinal computational study on the connection between emotional and amodal word representations from a developmental perspective. In this study, children’s and adult word representations were generated using the latent semantic analysis (LSA) vector space model and Word Maturity methodology. Some children’s word representations were used to set a mapping function between […]

Published on July 21, 2021