Grounding Language Processing: The Added Value of Specifying Linguistic/Compositional Representations and Processes
Abundant empirical evidence suggests that visual perception and motor responses are involved in language comprehension (‘grounding’). However, when modeling the grounding of sentence comprehension on a word-by-word basis, linguistic representations and cognitive processes are rarely made fully expli...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Ubiquity Press
2021-04-01
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| Series: | Journal of Cognition |
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| Online Access: | https://www.journalofcognition.org/articles/155 |
| Summary: | Abundant empirical evidence suggests that visual perception and motor responses are involved in language comprehension (‘grounding’). However, when modeling the grounding of sentence comprehension on a word-by-word basis, linguistic representations and cognitive processes are rarely made fully explicit. This article reviews representational formalisms and associated (computational) models with a view to accommodating incremental and compositional grounding effects. Are different representation formats equally suitable and what mechanisms and representations do models assume to accommodate grounding effects? I argue that we must minimally specify compositional semantic representations, a set of incremental processes/mechanisms, and an explicit link from the assumed processes to measured behavior. Different representational formats can be contrasted in psycholinguistic modeling by holding the set of processes/mechanisms constant; contrasting different processes/mechanisms is possible by holding representations constant. Such psycholinguistic modeling could be applied across a wide range of experimental investigations and complement computational modeling. |
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| ISSN: | 2514-4820 |