WORD SEMANTICS 1 DAY 26 – OCT 28, 2013 Brain & Language LING NSCI Harry Howard Tulane University

Course organization The syllabus, these slides and my recordings are available at If you want to learn more about EEG and neurolinguistics, you are welcome to participate in my lab. This is also a good way to get started on an honor's thesis. The grades are posted to Blackboard. 10/28/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 2

REVIEW I know, the quiz was the review, but let's review again. 10/28/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 3

Linguistic model, Fig. 2.1 p /28/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 4 Discourse model Syntax Sentence prosody Morphology Word prosody Segmental phonology perception Segmental phonology perception Acoustic phonetics Feature extraction Segmental phonology production Segmental phonology production Articulatory phonetics Speech motor control INPUT Sentence level Word level

What causes the priming effect? Table 9.4 Conditionsprime ~ probePriming effect 1.[–sem, +morph]casualty ~ casualno 2.[+sem, +morph]punishment ~ punishyes 3.[–sem, +morph]successful ~ successorno 4.[+sem, +morph]confession ~ confessorno 5.[–sem, +morph]restrain ~ strainno 6.[+sem, +morph]insincere ~ sincereyes 7.[–sem, +morph]depress ~ expressno 8.[+sem, +morph]unfasten ~ refastenyes 10/28/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 5

A little too early The previous experiment suggests that prefixes and suffixes are processed differently. I want to introduce a model of word semantics first, and then we will return to this issue. Ingram has a good summary of a PET and a MEG experiment on morphological processing. MEG is more informative, but to understand the results, we need to wait until we have discussed Broca’s area. 10/28/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 6

LEXICAL SEMANTICS 1 Ingram: III. Lexical semantics, §10. 10/28/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 7

Some semantic relations synonymy words share the same meaning: violin ~ fiddle antonymy words have opposite meanings: long ~ short hypernymy one word ‘contains’ the meaning of another in a taxonomy: animal ~ horse hyponymy one word is ‘contained’ in the meaning of another in a taxonomy: horse ~ animal holonymy one word is a whole for the meaning of another: hand ~ finger meronymy one word is a part for the meaning of another: finger ~ hand metonymy a part of a concept stands for the whole concept: Hollywood ~ American movie industry 10/28/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 8

Polysemy Write down all the meanings of “play” that you can think of. 1. Activity for amusement only, especially among the young. 2. The conduct, or course of a game. 3. An individual's performance in a sport or game. 4. An action carried out when it is one's turn to play. 5. A literary composition, intended to be represented by actors impersonating the characters and speaking the dialogue. 6. A theatrical performance featuring actors. 7. A major move by a business. 8. The extent to which a part of a mechanism can move freely. 9. A geological formation that contains an accumulation or prospect of hydrocarbons or other resources. 10/28/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 9

Semantic anomalies anomaly 1. a club for married bachelors 2. a vase of whiskey 3. colorless green ideas 4. your heart’s dissent 5. freeze structure 6. bang my hammer with a finger intended expression 1. ? 2. a flask of whiskey 3. ? 4. your heart’s content 5. phrase structure 6. bang my finger with a hammer 10/28/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 10

Write down every word that you associate with this object 10/28/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 11

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Semantic networks 10/28/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 13 Ingram goes into great detail on Quillian’s Teachable Language Comprehender (TLC); I could not find an image, but this illustrates the idea just as well.

NEXT TIME Continue with word semantics 10/28/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 14