Human concept learning presents a version of the classic problem of induction, which is made particularly difficult by the combination of two requirements: the need to learn from a rich (i.e. nested and overlapping) vocabulary of possible concepts and the need to be able to generalize concepts reasonably from only a few positive examples. I begin this thesis by considering a simple number concept game as a concrete illustration of this ability. On this task, human learners can with reasonable confidence lock in on one out of a billion billion billion logically possible concepts, after seeing only four positive examples of the concept, and can generalize informatively after seeing just a single example. Neither of the two classic approaches to inductive inference -- hypothesis testing in a constrained space of possible rules and computing similarity to the observed examples -- can provide a complete picture of how people generalize concepts in even this simple setting. This thesis prop...

The set of English modal verbs is widely recognized to communicate two broad clusters of meanings: epistemic and root modal meanings. A number of researchers have claimed that root meanings are acquired earlier than epistemic ones; this claim has subsequently been employed in the linguistics literature as an argument for the position that English modal verbs are polysemous (Sweetser, 1990). In this paper I offer an alternative explanation for the later emergence of epistemic interpretations by linking them to the development of the child's theory of mind (Wellman, 1990); if correct, this hypothesis might have important implications for the shape of the semantics of modal verbs.

Why do children learn nouns such as cup faster than dimensional adjectives such as big? Most explanations of this well-known phenomenon rely on prior knowledge in the child of the nounadjective distinction or on the logical priority of nouns as the arguments of predicates. In this paper we examine an alternative account, one which seeks to explain the relative ease of nouns over adjectives in terms of the response of the learner to various properties of the semantic categories to be learned and of the word learning task itself. We isolate four such properties: the relative size and the relative compactness of the regions in representational space associated with the categories, the presence or absence of lexical dimensions in the linguistic context of a word (what color is it? vs. what is it?), and the number of words of a particular type to be learned. In a set of five experiments, we trained a simple connectionist categorization device to label input objects, in particular ...

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This thesis develops a cognitive linguistic approach to language comprehension. The cognitive approach differs from traditional linguistic approaches in that linguistic description is seen as an integral part of the description of cognition, and that the object of description is the nature of conceptual structures, the processes which relate these conceptual structures, and the effect of context upon these processes. As a cognitive description within cognitive science, a computational approach is adopted: language comprehension is described in terms of two modules, a linguistic processing module and a discourse processing module. Within these modules, conceptual structures and processes are given a uniform characterization: structures are characterized as partial objects which are extended by processes into (potentially) less partial objects. In the linguistic processing module, linguistic expressions are characterized as signs which combine as head and modifier. The conceptual structu...

cognitive architecture?

One of the deepest and most ancient problems in philosophy is what we might call the problem of knowledge. There seems to be an unbridgeable gap between our abstract, complex, highly structured knowledge of the world, and the concrete, limited and confused information provided by our senses. Since the Meno, there have been two basic ways of approaching this problem, rationalism and empiricism. Each era seems to have its matched pair of advocates of each view, making their way through the centuries like couples in some eternal philosophical gavotte, Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and Locke, Leibniz and Berkeley, Kant and Mill. The rationalist approach says that although it looks as if we learn about the world from our experience, we don’t really. Actually, we knew about it all along. The most important things we know were there to begin with, planted innately in our minds by God or evolution (or chance). The empiricist approach says that although it looks as if our knowledge is far removed from our experience, it isn’t really. If we rearrange the elements of our experience in particular ways, by associating ideas, or putting together stimuli and responses, we’ll end up with our knowledge of the world. There is both a tension and a kind of complementarity between these two ideas,

lex interaction among frequency of the replacement cognitive word in established word frequency counts, the level of meaning as determined by the R. E. Frank and W. S. Hall (1991) conceptual difficulty hierarchy and whether the cognitive word was a cognate of think or know. Cognitive words, such as think and know, are a category within the internal state lexicon. Most internal state words are verbs with the as the subject (e.g., "John recalls the answer" and "Jill considers her friends viewpoint "). In particular, cognitive words may be central to accessing, monitoring, and transforming internal states (e.g., Hall, Scholnick, Hughes, 1987). Cognitive words enable people to make fine-grained distinctions among their cognitive states (Corson, 1985). For this reason, we argue that cognitive words may be essentially involved in the development of skilled reading comprehension. Cognitive words can provi

This study investigated children under- standing (3-, 9-, and of the differ- ent levels of meaning of the cognitive verb know as defined by the Hall, Scholnick, and Hughes (1987) abstractness andconceptual hierarchy. We found that cognitive verb knowledge increased with development and that certain low levels of meaning were mastered before certain high levels of meaning irrespective of the medium of presentation: video- taped skits and audiotaped stories. However, children developed an understanding of low levels of meaning at a more rapid rate than high levels of meaning. resulted in a more differentiated and hierarchical cognitive verb knowledge in older children. Finally, we found that the audiotaped stories were more than the videotaped skits, and that both tasks were significantly correlated with a standardized vocabulary measure for all ages except the implications of this study and others for a model of the cognitive verb lexicon are discussed. The development of...

The authors compared fifth-, seventh -, and tenth-graders, and college undergraduates cognitive word knowledge of the cognates of think and know within a theoret- ical framework focused on hierarchical levels of meaning. Cognitive words form a category within the internal state lexicon and may be central to accessing, monitoring, and transforming our internal states, all of which seem to be processes critical to reading comprehension. Cognitive word knowledge was positively correlated with achievement scores. The correlations with cognitive word knowledge were higher for Verbal (vocabulary and reading comprehension) than Quantitative achievement scores, and cognitive word knowledge increased with age. However, the order of acquisition of cognitive words depended on a complex interaction between the frequency of the cognitive word in established word frequency counts, the level of meaning as determined by the conceptual hierarchy, and whether the cognitive word was a cognate of thin...