Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-mzp66 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-26T04:05:58.958Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A crosslinguistic perspective on semantic cognition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2008

Asifa Majid  and
Falk Huettig
Asifa Majid
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen 6500AH, The Netherlands. Asifa.Majid@mpi.nlhttp://www.mpi.nl/Members/AsifaMajidFalk.Huettig@mpi.nlhttp://www.mpi.nl/Members/FalkHuettig
Falk Huettig
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen 6500AH, The Netherlands. Asifa.Majid@mpi.nlhttp://www.mpi.nl/Members/AsifaMajidFalk.Huettig@mpi.nlhttp://www.mpi.nl/Members/FalkHuettig
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Coherent covariation appears to be a powerful explanatory factor accounting for a range of phenomena in semantic cognition. But its role in accounting for the crosslinguistic facts is less clear. Variation in naming, within the same semantic domain, raises vexing questions about the necessary parameters needed to account for the basic facts underlying categorization.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 31 , Issue 6 , December 2008 , pp. 720 - 721
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Brown, P. (2007) “She had just cut/broken off her head”: Cutting and breaking verbs in Tzeltal. Cognitive Linguistics 18:319–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kay, P. & Regier, T. (2003) Resolving the question of color naming universals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 100:9085–89.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Levinson, S. C. (2007) Cut and break verbs in Yélî Dnye, the Papuan language of Rossel Island. Cognitive Linguistics 18:207–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Majid, A., Boster, J. S. & Bowerman, M. (forthcoming) The crosslinguistic categorization of everyday events: A study of cutting and breaking.Google Scholar
Majid, A., Bowerman, M., van Staden, M. & Boster, J. S. (2007a) The semantic categories of cutting and breaking: A crosslinguistic perspective. Cognitive Linguistics 18:133–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Majid, A., Gullberg, M., van Staden, M. & Bowerman, M. (2007b) How similar are semantic categories in closely related languages? A comparison of cutting and breaking in four Germanic languages. Cognitive Linguistics 18:179–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malt, B. C. (1995) Category coherence in cross-cultural perspective. Cognitive Psychology 29:85–148.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malt, B. C., Sloman, S. A., Gennari, S., Shi, M. & Wang, Y. (1999) Knowing versus naming: Similarity and the linguistic categorization of artifacts. Journal of Memory and Language 40:230–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rogers, T. T. & McClelland, J. L. (2004) Semantic cognition: A parallel distributed processing approach. MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar