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Related Experiment Video

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Perceptual and Category Processing of the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis' Dimension of Human Likeness: Some Methodological Issues

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Word meaning is both categorical and continuous.

Sean Trott¹, Benjamin Bergen¹

¹Department of Cognitive Science, University of California San Diego.

Psychological Review

|March 9, 2023

Summary

Word meanings are understood through both discrete categories and continuous representations. New hybrid theories integrating these views best explain behavioral data, suggesting word meaning is both categorical and continuous.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Science
Psycholinguistics
Computational Linguistics

Background:

Traditional theories of word meaning fall into two camps: categorical (discrete senses) and continuous (trajectories in state space).
Both categorical and continuous theories face empirical challenges in explaining how humans process word meaning.

Purpose of the Study:

To introduce and test novel hybrid theories of word meaning that integrate discrete and continuous representations.
To reconcile the dynamic, context-dependent nature of word meaning with evidence for category-like structures in lexical knowledge.

Main Methods:

Developed two novel hybrid theories of word meaning.
Conducted two behavioral experiments.
Employed an analytical approach using neural language models to evaluate competing theories.

Main Results:

Experimental results were best explained by a hybrid account combining discrete sense representations with a continuous meaning space.
This hybrid model successfully accommodates both context-dependent meaning shifts and categorical lexical structures.
Computational implementations of the hybrid account demonstrated significant predictive power.

Conclusions:

Human word meaning is best characterized as both categorical and continuous.
Hybrid models integrating discrete and gradient representations offer a more comprehensive explanation for lexical ambiguity.
Future research should investigate the emergence of discrete sense representations and their role in cognitive processes.