High-frequency words are often assumed to be the most useful words for communication, as they provide the greatest coverage of texts. However, the relationship between text coverage and comprehension may not be straightforward -- some words may …
What words are central in our semantic representations? In this experiment, we compared the core vocabulary derived from different association-based and language-based distributional models of semantic representation. Our question was: what kinds of …
Communication relies on a shared understanding of word meaning; however, recent evidence suggests that individual variation in meaning exists even for common nouns. Understanding where and how this variation arises is therefore integral to …
How and why do people share opinions online? In research conducted offline, the social identity of the audience is a key factor: whether they are composed of one’s ingroup or outgroup affects what people share and why. Do people behave similarly and …
A central question in cognitive science is how semantic information is mentally represented. Two dominant theories of semantic representation are language-based distributional semantic models (which suggest that word meaning is based on which words …
Efficient communication leaves gaps between message and meaning. Interlocutors, by reasoning about how each other reasons, can help to fill these gaps. To the extent that such meta-inference is not calibrated, communication is impaired, raising the …