Linguistic Relativity and Word Acquisition: A Computational Approach

Language plays a pervasive role in our day-to-day experience and is likely to have an effect on other non-linguistic aspects of life. At the same time, language is itself constrained by the world. In this paper we study this interaction using Playpen, a connectionist model of the acquisition of word meaning. We argue that the interaction between linguistic and non-linguistic categories depends on the pattern of correlations in the world and on their relation to the correlations defined by words. We then discuss three kinds of possible interactions and present simulations of each using Playpen, a neural-network model of the acquisition of word meaning.