Word processing

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Cai, Zhenguang and Vigliocco, Gabriella (2018) Word processing. In: The Stevens’ Handbook of Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. Wiley. ISBN 978-1-119-17005-1

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Abstract

This chapter reviews theories and empirical research on how humans retrieve meaning from speech or text. We first review research concerning how word meanings are represented. Here theories are divided between embodiment accounts proposing that word meanings are grounded in sensorimotor systems, and distributional semantics accounts proposing that meanings can be viewed as inter-word distributional relations. We argued that these two approaches deal with different aspects of word meanings and should be integrated. For meaning retrieval, we discussed previous research showing that both meaning dominance and prior context determine the access and retrieval of meanings. We also discuss how the selected and unselected meanings may be later suppressed and reinstantiated. Finally, we proposed that prior, concurrent or subsequent contexts, situated in the framework of inferential/predictive language processing, play different roles in word processing. Prior context constitutes the prior knowledge that sets the stage for word recognition and meaning retrieval, concurrent context constrains the recognition of the word/meaning, and subsequent context updates lexico-semantic knowledge against recent experience. We proposed that future research should investigate words in their natural habitat of contextualised and multimodal language communication.

Item Type: Book Section
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
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Depositing User: Pure Connector
Date Deposited: 26 Aug 2017 05:08
Last Modified: 26 May 2022 15:30
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/64681
DOI:

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