Language knowledge and event knowledge in language use

Abstract

This paper examines how semantic knowledge is used in language comprehension and in making judgments about events in the world. We contrast knowledge gleaned from prior language experience ("language knowledge") and knowledge coming from prior experience with the world ("world knowledge"). In two corpus analyses, we show that previous research linking verb aspect and event representations have confounded language and world knowledge. Then, using carefully chosen stimuli that remove this confound, we performed four experiments that manipulated the degree to which language knowledge or world knowledge should be salient and relevant to performing a task, finding in each case that participants use the type of knowledge most appropriate to the task. These results provide evidence for a highly context-sensitive and interactionist perspective on how semantic knowledge is represented and used during language processing.

Keywords: Event representation; Language comprehension; Language production; Semantic memory; Word meaning.

Fig. 1

Fig. 1A. The mean co-occurrence probabilities (and standard errors) of the verb phrase-location pairs from Ferretti et al. (2007), calculated within a sentence as the probability of the location given the verb phrase in a 540-million-word Wikipedia corpus. Fig. 1B. The mean reaction times (and standard errors) in the semantic priming naming experiment conducted by Ferretti et al. (2007) (Experiment 1).

Fig. 2

Fig. 2A. Histograms for past progressive vs. past perfect verbs in the Wikipedia corpus, showing the number of verbs that co-occur with different numbers of location words. For example (describing the two leftmost bars), three of the past progressive verbs co-occurred with between 0 and 4 locations, and 4 of the past progressive verbs co-occurred with between 5 and 8 locations. Fig. 2B. The mean co-occurrence probabilities (and standard errors) of the most frequent location collocate, and the mean overall probability of co-occurrence with a location, for both past progressive and past progressive verbs.

Fig. 3

Participants’ mean ratings (and standard errors) of the plausibility of verb phrase – location pairs (e.g. was buying – supermarket), as a function of the verb phrase’s aspect, the pair’s semantic relatedness, and the pair’s probability of co-occurring in sentences in the 530-million-word Wikipedia corpus.

Fig. 4

Participants’ mean reaction times (and standard errors) in a semantic priming experiment with a semantic judgment task – as a function of the verb phrase’s aspect, the pair’s semantic relatedness, and the pair’s probability of co-occurring in sentences in the 530-million-word Wikipedia corpus.

Fig. 5

Participants’ mean reaction times (and standard errors) in a semantic priming experiment with a naming task – as a function of the verb phrase’s aspect, the pair’s semantic relatedness, and the pair’s probability of co-occurring in sentences in the 530-million-word Wikipedia corpus.

Fig. 6

Corpus co-occurrence probabilities (mean and standard error), as a function of the number of participants who produced that pair in the Experiment 2B.