This paper provides an overview of the possible function of nonarbitrary mappings between linguistic form and meaning, and presents new empirical evidence showing that shared cross-modal associations may underlie motion sound-symbolism in particular. In terms of function, several lines of empirical and theoretical evidence suggest that non-arbitrary form-meaning connections could have played a ...

Verbs are the centerpiece of the sentence, and understanding of verb meanings is essential for language acquisition. Yet verb learning is said to be more challenging than noun learning for young children for several reasons. First, while nouns tend to denote concrete objects, which are perceptually stable over time, verbs tend to refer to action events, which are temporally ephemeral, and the b...

Purpose: Prosody is the variation of dynamics, frequency, rate, and tone that carries contextual meaning in speech. The purpose of this study is to present an overview of prosody in speech from evolutionary, developmental and cultural perspectives, and to review implications in therapy for voice disorders. Methods: Cross-disciplinary overview. Results: Applications of prosody from linguistics, ...

For many centuries, a predominant view of meaning was that the meaning of a word is some kind of chunk of mind-stuff (“idea”) glued to the word and animating it. However, while the traditional view was that we must first understand meaning, which enables us to understand language and hence our linguistic practices, a new approach to semantics that has emerged in the second half of the twentieth...

Recent work investigating the interaction of the speech signal with the meaning of the verbal content has revealed interactions not yet modelled in either speech recognition technology or in contemporary linguistic science. In this paper we describe paralinguistic speech features that co-exist alongside linguistic content and propose a model of their function and usage, and discuss methods for ...

In this paper, we introduce the method of spoken language understanding in the Linguistic Processor of a Chinese Spoken Dialogue System Engine. The Linguistic Processor is conceived for the development of simple, robust nature language interfaces to different applications. It is designed for extracting meaning representation from Chinese spoken utterances. Its strategy is to apply grammatical c...

• Linguistic: induce semantic frame and syntactic dependency-based patterns that aim to capture the meaning of a sentence and use them as features • Extra-linguistic: improve the classification of a test post by exploiting the information in other test posts that are likely to have the same stance Aim: improve a learner’s ability to generalize by inducing patterns based on semantic frames and u...

There has been considerable increase of interest recently among theoretical linguists in empirical data that go beyond intuitive judgements on grammaticality and meaning of linguistic expressions. This concerns, among other areas, data resulting from experiments during which subjects carry out various linguistic or non-linguistic tasks that are somehow connected with the production or comprehen...

We propose a computational model of situated language comprehension based on the Indexical Hypothesis that generates meaning representations by translating amodal linguistic symbols to modal representations of beliefs, knowledge, and experience external to the linguistic system. The model incorporates multiple information sources including perceptions, domain knowledge, and short and long-term ...